oppn parties The UP Scenario: Not Easy For Akhilesh Yadav

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  • In Assam, a controversy erupted after a picture of UPPL leader Benjamin Basumatary, lying on a stack of Rs 500 notes circulated on social media. UPPL is an ally of the BJP
  • AAP's Jalandhar-West MP Sushil Kumar Rinku joins the BJP. He was the only AAP Lok Sabha MP
  • Supreme Court dismisses Centre's plea to review its 2023 verdict in the PMLA case
  • Close save for passengers as they remain unhurt after the wings of two planes graze at Kolkata airport. Pilots derostered and inquiry ordered by DGCA
  • Bengal BJP leader Dilip Ghosh gets notice from the EC as well as the BJP for making ugly remarks about Mamata Banerjee's parentage
  • Sadanand Vasanth Date, who faught terrorists in the 26/11 attack and was awarded the Preisent's Police medal, has been appointed the head of the NIA
  • Centre will borrow Rs 7.5L cr in the first six months of FY25, nearly 50% of the target for the full year
  • 25 stocks, including SBI, will see same day trade settlements from today in the world's fastest settlement mode in both BSE and NSE
  • Stocks recover smartly on Wednesday: Sensex rises 526 points to 72996 and Nifty 118 points to 22123
  • Tennis: Rohan Bopanna-Matthew Ebden reached the semifinals of the Miami Open
  • IPL: records tumble as SRH beat MI in a high-scoring match. SRH score 277/3 with 18 sixes and Mumbai score 246 with 20 sixes to fall short by 31 runs. Atotal of 38 sixes, highest in an IPL match were hit and both teams combined to score 523 runs, the highest aggregate in an IPL match
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  • IPL: RCB beat Punjab by 4 wickets as Kohli and Karthik shine with the bat
  • India strongly objected to German foreign office remarks over the arrest of delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, called it "biased assumptions"
Delhi Lt Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena says government cannot be run from jail, hints at President's Rule in the capital ////// In a dangerous incident, the wings of two planes grazed while taxiing on the runway at Kolkata airport, all passengers were safe but DGCA ordered an inquiry and the pilots were derostered
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The UP Scenario: Not Easy For Akhilesh Yadav

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2022-01-17 03:11:06

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.

In an excellent analysis of how transfer of votes from the BJP and other parties to the SP would affect the results in the UP elections, Rahul Verma and Vaibhav Parik, both with Centre of Policy Research, New Delhi, have shown in an article in India Today that Akhilesh Yadav will needs a swing of more than 8 percent votes in the best case scenario and more than 11 percent in the worst case scenario to get majority in the assembly, and about a percent less to get more seats than the BJP without getting a majority.

Their analysis clearly shows that while it is good to check all the caste boxes, as Akhilesh has been doing by snaring OBC leaders from the BJP and other parties to add to his Yadav and Muslim vote bank, it is the manner in which votes are actually transferred on the ground that matters when it comes to winning seats. They have shown how if the SP manages to get transfer of votes from other parties, it will not be enough to unseat the BJP. For SP to unseat the BJP, the transfer of votes will have to majorly come from the BJP. The BJP must lose votes and those votes must be transferred to the SP for it to win sizeable number of seats at the BJPs cost.

This means that Akhilesh Yadav and his alliance still have a lot of hard work to do and run an effective campaign if it wishes to get a majority as it will have to lure the BJP voter to vote for it this time. It will have to ensure that the BJP vote share dips to the extent required and majority of it comes to the SP alliance. That is not going to be a very easy task.

But the SP can take heart from the fact that after the departure of several OBC leaders from the BJP and their entry into SP, the votes of the OBC community might get transferred to the SP alliance. The BJP had swept UP with a 24.67% swing in its favour which got it 312 seats in 2017. At that time, the SP had lost 7.33% vote share and 177 seats while the BSP had lost 3.68% vote share and 61 seats. BJPs social engineering had transferred most SP and BSP votes to it. Akhilesh Yadav can hope that his own brand of social engineering will do the same for the SP this time.


Read the India Today article here