How will these parties fare in the next round in early 2022 when seven states go to the polls? The most crucial of these contests will be in Uttar Pradesh. Even more than West Bengal, on which the BJP had set its heart only to be bitterly disappointed, UP is of prime importance to the party.

If Gujarat was once the BJP’s Hindutva laboratory, UP is no less so today when the party tries out many of its plans for the pro-Hindu agenda in the state. To pursue these, the BJP appointed one of the most hawkish of its members, Yogi Adityanath, as the chief minister.

And the latter lost no time to turn the state saffron by giving a Hindu name to two prominent towns - Allahabad which is now Prayagraj, and Mughal Sarai which is now Deen Dayal Upadhyay Nagar. But the most polarizing of the pro-Hindu programmes are the “love jehad” laws which are meant to scuttle interfaith marriages and tell Muslims that they have no place in Indian society.

It is understandable, therefore, why UP is the key to the BJP’s electoral ambitions. A setback there will undermine all the saffronizing endeavours of the BJP and the RSS. Not only that, it will put an end to the speculation of Yogi Adityanath becoming the next prime minister to ensure that there is no slackening of the Sangh parivar’s progress towards a Hindu rashtra.

To avoid any electoral reverses, therefore, the BJP and the RSS are making strenuous efforts to shore up the former’s position at a time when the Adityanath government has suffered a serious erosion of its standing because of the mishandling of the pandemic.

As patients die because of oxygen shortage to add to the number of burning pyres or unclaimed bodies of villagers float down the “shavbahini” (the bearer of corpses) Ganga, as a Guarati poetess has lamented, the BJP and the RSS have become increasingly nervous about the party’s prospects when the elections are held early next year.

To rectify the dire situation, the prime minister, the home minister and the BJP president held a meeting with the RSS general secretary, Dattatreya Hosabale, who is currently the key link between the two organizations. Hosabale then spent four days in U.P. apparently to ascertain how badly the Yogi administration’s image has been affected.

If the outcome of the recent panchayat polls is an indication, then the BJP is in trouble because of the substantial gains made by the Samawadi Party, which came out on top, and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) which performed satisfactorily in its western U.P. strongholds. If the RLD teams up with its Jat brethren among the protesting farmers during the elections, then the BJP’s troubles will be compounded.

It is the Samajwadi Party-RLD combine, therefore, which is expected to give the BJP a run for its money next February now that the earlier “bua-bhatija” camaraderie of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)’s Mayawati and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav has ended, largely because of the BSP czarina’s suspected dalliance with the BJP.

Where is the Congress at a time when the opposition is quietly lining up against a palpably vulnerable BJP? The speculation that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will move to Lucknow and be the party’s chief ministerial face has died down. Instead of Lucknow, she set up her base in Gurugram after the government evicted her from her Lodhi Estate bungalow. Her move only confirmed that the Gandhis prefer the high life of the national capital region to any provincial sojourn.

The same high-nosed attitude can be seen in her brother, Rahul, who seems to prefer tweeting from his air-conditioned redoubt in Tughlaq Lane to any hard-scrabble endeavour at the ground level to build up the party from the grassroots. It appears, therefore, that the Congress will be an “also ran” in U.P. just as it was in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Unlike the Congress’s laidback attitude, the BJP is expected to fight tooth and nail to retain its position in UP. Among its time-tested methods will be the depiction of Its opponents as pro-Muslim and, therefore, essentially ant-national. The chief minister may well reiterate his earlier division of the population into Bajrang Balis and Alis. But such dirty tricks do not always succeed as the failure of calling Mamata Banerjee “Begum” showed in West Bengal. (IPA Service)