The office of the Yuva Sangharsh Morcha in Chandauli is wrapped in a swirl of dust as the afternoon loo—the dry, gusty hot winds that sweep the Indo-Gangetic plains—whip up mud from the fields around. But it does not deter morcha leader and lawyer Shailendra Singh and his band of men from moving men and material to the set-up for the public rally of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Mahendra Nath Pandey, scheduled to happen a few kilometres away and later in the day. The morcha, set up independently by young professionals to fight corruption, is clearly with the BJP even as Singh rolls out a list of woes that dog the backward district of Chandauli, just outside the star constituency of Varanasi.

Singh says 60-year-old Pandey’s appeal to the Yuva Morcha is because he’s a former student leader from Banaras Hindu University, he was a minister in the state with several governments including Narendra Modi’s at the Centre, and came back to Chandauli after he was appointed the state BJP president in September 2017. To assert the morcha’s independence, Singh adds that no political party has addressed the twin problems of corruption and development.

“No government has given jobs,” he says. “There are two lakh police vacancies in the state today. The recruitment of 68,000 primary teachers is in the court because of irregularities in the process. For Mudra loans, there’s corruption in the banks. Only bribery can get you Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act funds. Pandeyji has done some work as the sitting MP, from building a railway overbridge to roads, etc.”

The BJP’s Pandey is pitted against the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party Mahagathbandhan candidate Sanjay Chauhan, who represents the SP. The Congress is not contesting the seat but has nominated Shivkanya Kushwaha of the Jan Adhikar Party.

Both the SP-BSP and Congress have attempted social engineering to defeat the BJP. SP president Akhilesh Yadav chose Chauhan to mop up castes beyond the SP-BSP’s Yadav-Jatav-Muslim votebank. This is because during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and the 2017 state elections, the SP was beaten back by the non-Yadav OBCs who voted for the BJP and swept it to power.

Chauhan, who is from Ghazipur constituency, is the president of the People’s Socialist Party, and has been working for over two years with Akhilesh to bring the Chauhans into the SP fold. The Chauhans constitute around one lakh votes in Chandauli and calculations are they will add to the over five lakh votes of the SP-BSP combined.

The morcha’s Shailendra Singh is dismissive of Chauhan, saying he’ll be voted out as an outsider.

The Congress’s nomination, Shivkanya Kushwaha of the Jan Adhikar Party, is the wife of Babu Singh Kushwaha, once a close confidante of BSP’s Mayawati. He had joined the BJP in 2012 amidst charges of corruption and murder made against him, and later resigned from the BJP and formed the JAP. Meanwhile, Shivkanya joined the SP in 2012 and even came second to the BJP’s candidate in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll in Ghazipur. By leaving the seat to her, the Congress hopes to dent the BJP votebank of non-Yadav, non-Jatav OBCs and Dalits which the BJP has shrewdly worked on since 2014 to make it a winning coup.

In fact, the story in this region is how the Congress is cutting into the BJP votes rather than the SP-BSP votes as is widely believed, and the dismay and woes of the Brahmins towards the BJP.  

In Chandauli, for instance, Mahendra Nath Pandey will have a tough task ahead as the Brahmins seem quite upset with chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Take Navneet Pandey, a resident of Mughalsarai. A graduate who is currently unemployed, he says: “We do not get jobs anymore, all the high positions in the government—from collectors to police officers—are now from Yogi’s Kshatriya caste. He hasn’t done anything to find the culprits of five Brahmin youths who were killed in Raebareli two years ago.”

His friends raise how just before elections, another Brahmin leader, Laxmikant Bajpai, was replaced as state party chief by an OBC leader Keshav Prasad Maurya. The latter not only scripted the spectacular BJP win in 2017, but was also rewarded with a deputy chief ministership. The Brahmins view the induction of many OBC and other backward caste groups by BJP chief Amit Shah and Prime Minister Modi as a conspiracy to snub them. Though Mahendra Nath Pandey was made state party chief after the poll to assuage the community, his candidature today is seen by the Brahmins as a belated move.

The clash between Brahmins and Kshatriyas has a long history here. Last year, in Gorakhpur, notorious bahubali (don) Harishankar Tiwari, a former BJP and SP minister who is also a Brahmin, accused Adityanath of vengefulness and malice when a posse of state police walked into his residence and searched the house, ostensibly for dacoits who looted a cashier of a private firm of ₹95 lakhs. The feud between Tiwari and Adityanath goes back two decades as rivals of two centres of power: Brahmin and Kshatriya muscle power groups. So much so, with other powerful bahubalis, Gorakhpur came to be known as “Chicago of the East.”  

Harishankar Tiwari’s son Vinay Tiwari won on a BSP ticket from Chillupur in the Assembly poll, the only seat that was lost by the BJP in Gorakhpur’s nine Assembly constituencies. The Brahmins have not forgotten this insult to the community. In a bid to placate them, the BJP has fielded Ravi Kishan—popular Bhojpuri singer from Jaunpur and a Brahmin—in the Gorakhpur seat.

The Brahmins constitute barely 12 per cent of the state but wield enormous power and influence. That they need to be constantly cajoled was also seen when Sant Kabir Nagar MP Sharad Tripathi was denied a ticket after news reports showed him raining blows with a shoe on his party MLA Rakesh Singh Baghel early this year. The blowout was symptomatic of the simmering Brahmin-Kshatriya war in the Adityanath government. So much so that when Tripathi was summoned by party president Pandey following the incident, he was sent off in a cavalcade of cheering supporters from the community for rightly teaching Baghel a lesson.

The party leadership has sought to mollify the MP by giving his father and former party president, Ramapati Tripathi, a ticket.

The BSP too is playing its old Dalit-Brahmin card by rushing to give Ritesh Pandey, a sitting BSP MLA from Jalalpur, a ticket in Ambedkar Nagar, while the BJP has fielded Mukut Bihari Verma from a backward caste. Ritesh Pandey is the son of former BSP MP and multi-millionaire contractor Rakesh Pandey, whose other son, Ashish, was captured on national television brandishing a gun outside a five-star hotel in Delhi. Meanwhile, the sitting BJP MP, Hari Om Pandey, a Brahmin, was booted out after a video went viral where he’s seen saying his party only gives tickets to candidates who provide money and girls to the leadership.

According to Rajesh Gautam, BSP district president of Mirzapur: “Other BSP Brahmin candidates include Bheeshma Shankar alias Kushal Tiwari in Sant Kabir Nagar, Ashok Kumar Tripathi from Pratapgarh, Atul Rai from Ghosi, Ranganath Mishra in Bhadohi, and Guddu Pandit from Fatehpur Sikhri.”

Meanwhile, the Congress, which has a negligible seven per cent vote share in the state, seems to be playing a covert game to defeat the BJP and help the SP-BSP alliance, even though the latter refused to extend a hand of friendship to join the alliance. A district Congress leader from Chandauli, who didn’t want to be named, agrees a two-way contest would have benefitted the BJP.

He points out: “A bi-polar contest would have benefited the BJP as all the upper castes, the non-Yadav, non-Jatav castes would have consolidated en block behind the BJP, which gave the party a sweep in UP. However, in a three-way contest, with the Congress outside the coalition, the party has the potential to damage the BJP as it can divide upper castes like Brahmins, who want to teach a lesson to the BJP.”

Barely a fortnight ago, when UP had voted in four out of the seven phases, Congress leader in charge of eastern UP, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, was candid when she said, “We have carefully chosen candidates so that either the Congress wins or they cut into BJP votes. The Congress is not at all cutting into the gathbandhan’s votes.”  

To everyone’s surprise, the SP and BSP leaders denied this vehemently. Akhilesh said the Congress was faking excuses in the face of imminent defeat. Mayawati alleged a collusion between the Congress and BJP. It forced Vadra to say she’d rather die than help the BJP.

The reason is straightforward. The mostly upper caste Congress voters rarely vote for OBC-Dalit parties like the SP-BSP. And if there was a coalition, they would have most likely voted for the BJP where there was no Congress candidate. But separately, the Congress’s candidates are more likely to hit the BJP. This was already seen in constituencies like Mathura, where the Congress put up a Brahmin candidate who could eat into the votes of the BJP’s Hema Malini. In Amroha, the Congress withdrew its candidate Rashid Alvi after the BSP announced Danish Ali’s name, and replaced him with a novice, Sachin Chaudhary. Several other constituencies like Rampur, Meerut and Ghaziabad among others have seen an accommodating Congress for the SP-BSP alliance.

Take the seats in the region that will go to polls on May 19: Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria, Bansgaon, Ghosi, Salempur, Ballia, Ghazipur, Chandauli, Varanasi, Mirzapur and Robertsganj.

In Gorakhpur, says local political analyst and social activist Manoj Singh, “The Congress has fielded Madhusudan Tiwari, another Brahmin, against the BJP’s Ravi Kishan, who had earlier fought on a Congress ticket in 2014 but was wiped out in the Modi wave. Kishan is seen as an outsider and it will be a source of personal embarrassment for Adityanath if Kishan loses, so he’s spending the last week campaigning here in Gorakhpur.“

Kishan will also face SP-BSP candidate Ram Bhuwal Nishad, a minister in Mayawati’s government from the Nishad community, which had slayed the BJP candidate in the by-poll last year. However, the victorious Nishad leader, Praveen Kumar Nishad, who was then the SP-BSP candidate, has now joined the BJP, to the horror of the alliance. He will, however, fight from Sant Kabir Nagar constituency.

In Ghazipur, the Congress’s Ajit Kushwaha is expected to divide the community that is inclined towards the BJP, to help the SP-BSP’s Afzal Ansari, brother of jailed don Mukhtar Ansari. Similarly, in Chandauli, Shivkanya Kushwaha is expected to eat into BJP votes to help SP-BSP’s Sanjay Chauhan.

In Mirzapur, Lalitesh Pati Tripathi, a Brahmin, is expected to eat into the upper caste votes of the BJP’s alliance partner, Apna Dal. In Robertsganj, Pakauri Lal, the SP’s former MP in 2009, joined the Apna Dal (Sonelal) in March this year and is contesting with BJP support. The SP’s Bhai Lal Kol had won the seat in a by-poll in 2007 on a BSP ticket. The Congress’s Bhagwati Prasad Chaudhary is expected to hit the Apna Dal trader votes.

In Maharajganj, the Congress has fielded Supriya Srinetra, a former journalist with Economic Times in Delhi whose late father is two-time MP Harsh Vardhan, who was last elected in 2009. Srinetra is expected to eat into the votes of sitting BJP MP Pankaj Choudhary, a five-time MP since 1991. Choudhary will be facing the SP-BSP’s Akilesh Singh who last won in 1999.      

In Kushinagar, the Congress’s RPN Singh, a former minister, is fortunate that estranged BJP ally, Om Prakash Rajbhar of the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, is determined to crush the BJP. The BJP had refused to give him the Ghosi seat, and he has sworn to influence the BJP’s defeat in at least 30 seats in eastern UP. The Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party’s national general secretary Arun Rajbhar has declared they will support the Congress in Mirzapur, and the SP-BSP alliance in Maharajganj and Bansgaon.

In Deoria, the Congress’s Niyaz Ahmed is not expected to impact the direct fight between the BJP’s Ramapati Tripathi and the SP-BSP’s Vinod Jaiswal, a prosperous liquor manufacturer.

In Varanasi, the BJP’s star candidate Narendra Modi has ensured there’s no caste factor that could bring down his margin of 3.37 lakh votes.

In the pitched battle of caste arithmetic of Uttar Pradesh, it’s not about issues but simply about numbers. As the wise old Ram Gaur says, sipping his chai outside a grain shop, “Jiski lathi, uski bains (The one who wields the stick owns the buffalo).”