As Thakurdwara in Uttar Pradesh went to the polls on Saturday to elect a new MLA, observers were asking one question. Would the recent attempts by the Bharatiya Janata Party to pit the the area's Dalits against their Muslim neighbours over the question of a temple loudspeaker in the adjoining Kanth subdivision pay off?
Three Lok Sabha constituencies and 33 assembly seats in nine states went to the polls yesterday, to replace representatives who had been voted to the Lok Sabha in May or who had been voted in from two parliamentary constituencies. The results of these byelections are being seen as an early popularity test for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But the run-up to the election in UP was marked by inflammatory rhetoric and low-key violence. Eleven seats are up for grabs here. In many places, the BJP and its allies attempted to polarise voters by suggesting that Muslims had launched a love jihad to seduce young Hindu women and then convert them to Islam. In the Moradabad region where Thakurdwara is located, the BJP turned a police decision to remove a newly mounted loudspeaker on a Dalit temple into a flash point.
Situation is murky
The results of the strategy will be known when counting takes place on September 16. On polling day, though, no one – not even the constituency's Dalit voters – were clear about how significantly the loudspeaker violence in Kanth had influenced their voting decisions.
“Whatever is the truth of Kanth, a section of Dalits in Thakurdwara constituency is convinced that only the BJP fought for them,” said Krishnachandra Singh, a Dalit resident of Dilari village.
However, his views were not shared by Rampal Singh, a Dalit resident of Kala Jhanda village which is close to Thakurdwara town. “It is true that a section of Dalits has gone over to the BJP, but that section is very small," he said. "Such Dalits do not represent the majority.”
While Nayagaon Akbarpur Chedri village where the controversial temple is located is limping to normalcy, the BJP and its associated organisations kept it in the spotlight during the campaign. On Thursday, BJP leader Sadhvi Prachi allegedly made inflammatory remarks against Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav at an election rally at Sultanpur village in Thakurdwara, prompting the Moradabad district administration to lodge an FIR against her. “If you continue to vote for the Samajwadi Party, then the day is not far when all the loudspeakers from temples will be pulled down,” she is alleged to have said.
Prachi is already facing charges for her role in the last year’s communal riots in Muzaffarnagar.
On the last day of campaign, Prachi visited almost every Dalit household in Kala Jhanda, said Kishan Swarup Singh, a Dalit and former village pradhan. “She told me about the Kanth incident and the positive role the BJP played in it," he said. "She also claimed to be a Dalit and asked me to vote for the BJP.”
But Singh said that he holds the BJP responsible for the violence in his constituency and told Prachi so. “I I told her all this because I wanted to make her realise that through this act the BJP might get the votes of some of the Dalits but it cannot get my vote,” he said.
Intense campaign
According to Sushil Kumar Bishnoi, an upper caste resident of Lalapur village in Thakurdwara subdivision, “Even the workers of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] carried out a massive door-to-door campaign and used the Kanth incident to polarise voters in this constituency.”
Despite this, the result is far from clear. Some voters see Saturday’s by-poll as a three-way fight between the BJP’s Rajpal Chauhan, the SP’s Nawab Jaan Khan and the Congress’ Mohammadullah Choudhary. Others believe that it is straight contest between the BJP and the SP candidates.
Thakurdwara Assembly seat has nearly 330,000 votes. Non-Dalit Hindus and Muslims account for nearly 150,000 each. The rest of the voters are from the Scheduled Castes, the majority of them being Jatavs, the caste that has traditionally remained the core vote base of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. Since the BSP has not fielded any candidates of its own in this election, it is widely believed that – given the composition of voters in Thakurdwara – the Dalits will play a critical role in deciding who wins from this seat.
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Three Lok Sabha constituencies and 33 assembly seats in nine states went to the polls yesterday, to replace representatives who had been voted to the Lok Sabha in May or who had been voted in from two parliamentary constituencies. The results of these byelections are being seen as an early popularity test for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But the run-up to the election in UP was marked by inflammatory rhetoric and low-key violence. Eleven seats are up for grabs here. In many places, the BJP and its allies attempted to polarise voters by suggesting that Muslims had launched a love jihad to seduce young Hindu women and then convert them to Islam. In the Moradabad region where Thakurdwara is located, the BJP turned a police decision to remove a newly mounted loudspeaker on a Dalit temple into a flash point.
Situation is murky
The results of the strategy will be known when counting takes place on September 16. On polling day, though, no one – not even the constituency's Dalit voters – were clear about how significantly the loudspeaker violence in Kanth had influenced their voting decisions.
“Whatever is the truth of Kanth, a section of Dalits in Thakurdwara constituency is convinced that only the BJP fought for them,” said Krishnachandra Singh, a Dalit resident of Dilari village.
However, his views were not shared by Rampal Singh, a Dalit resident of Kala Jhanda village which is close to Thakurdwara town. “It is true that a section of Dalits has gone over to the BJP, but that section is very small," he said. "Such Dalits do not represent the majority.”
While Nayagaon Akbarpur Chedri village where the controversial temple is located is limping to normalcy, the BJP and its associated organisations kept it in the spotlight during the campaign. On Thursday, BJP leader Sadhvi Prachi allegedly made inflammatory remarks against Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav at an election rally at Sultanpur village in Thakurdwara, prompting the Moradabad district administration to lodge an FIR against her. “If you continue to vote for the Samajwadi Party, then the day is not far when all the loudspeakers from temples will be pulled down,” she is alleged to have said.
Prachi is already facing charges for her role in the last year’s communal riots in Muzaffarnagar.
On the last day of campaign, Prachi visited almost every Dalit household in Kala Jhanda, said Kishan Swarup Singh, a Dalit and former village pradhan. “She told me about the Kanth incident and the positive role the BJP played in it," he said. "She also claimed to be a Dalit and asked me to vote for the BJP.”
But Singh said that he holds the BJP responsible for the violence in his constituency and told Prachi so. “I I told her all this because I wanted to make her realise that through this act the BJP might get the votes of some of the Dalits but it cannot get my vote,” he said.
Intense campaign
According to Sushil Kumar Bishnoi, an upper caste resident of Lalapur village in Thakurdwara subdivision, “Even the workers of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] carried out a massive door-to-door campaign and used the Kanth incident to polarise voters in this constituency.”
Despite this, the result is far from clear. Some voters see Saturday’s by-poll as a three-way fight between the BJP’s Rajpal Chauhan, the SP’s Nawab Jaan Khan and the Congress’ Mohammadullah Choudhary. Others believe that it is straight contest between the BJP and the SP candidates.
Thakurdwara Assembly seat has nearly 330,000 votes. Non-Dalit Hindus and Muslims account for nearly 150,000 each. The rest of the voters are from the Scheduled Castes, the majority of them being Jatavs, the caste that has traditionally remained the core vote base of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. Since the BSP has not fielded any candidates of its own in this election, it is widely believed that – given the composition of voters in Thakurdwara – the Dalits will play a critical role in deciding who wins from this seat.