BJP’s UP poll strategy: Why it keeps invoking SP’s past | Political Pulse News

He then urged people to recognise “these corrupt people”, “sympathisers of the mafia” and “friends of rioters” when they return in a new garb. Even the SP, he said, is now chanting Lord Ram’s name. “Lekin yaad rakhna aap Bajrangi hain… Kaalnemi ko Bajrangi ne hi pehchana tha (But remember, you are Bajrangi… It was Bajrangi who saw through Kaalnemi’s disguise),” he told the crowd.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath listens to people’s grievances during Janata Darshan in Gorakhpur on Sunday. (ANI)

Five days later, as the BJP formally moved its organisation into election mode with its state working committee meeting in Lucknow, Union Home Minister Amit Shah went further back in time to the Mulayam Singh Yadav government of 1990.

Recalling the October 30, 1990 police firing on kar sevaks in Ayodhya, Shah asked Akhilesh: “With what face do you even speak of forming a government?” Shah contrasted the firing with the construction of the Ram temple and said people would not forgive even the SP chief’s “third generation”.

After nearly 10 years of the Adityanath government, the emerging BJP campaign carries an apparent paradox: even as the party seeks a third successive term on the strength of its record, a considerable part of its political messaging continues to be about Mulayam, Akhilesh and what Uttar Pradesh was like before 2017, when Adityanath first came to power.

It has similarities with how the NDA ran its campaign in the 2025 Bihar polls where Nitish Kumar was facing a nearly 20-year anti-incumbency. The NDA’s campaign then was as much about reminding the voters of RJD’s “jungle raaj” as it was about Kumar’s achievements.

‘Then vs now’

This formulation has appeared repeatedly in speeches by senior BJP leaders in UP.

On October 19, Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said the SP’s “hooliganism and mafia rule” would “never return to Uttar Pradesh”. Earlier in the month, Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak said: “The people of Uttar Pradesh have not forgotten the SP’s record of lawlessness and mafia culture.”

Adityanath has reinforced the message through easily recalled formulations. Across rallies this year, he has invoked “Dekh Sapai, bitiya ghabrai” to characterise women’s security before 2017. The earlier dispensation has also been described as “one district, one mafia”, contrasted with his government’s “one district, one product”.

The BJP’s campaign material makes the comparison more explicit. One set of creatives from its Uttar Pradesh unit uses a straightforward “SP government versus BJP government” format. One shows gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed under the former and the attachment of his benami property under the latter. Another contrasts an old report about investors raising law-and-order concerns with present-day claims about UP’s tourism boom.

A third places the SP government’s spending on boundary walls of graveyards against the Adityanath government’s declaration of a holiday on Mahanavami, under “tushtikaran apar” and “aastha ka satkar”. Yet another contrasts 1990, represented by violence surrounding the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, with 2026 and the completed Ram temple.

No negativity, says BJP

The BJP rejects the suggestion that this amounts to falling back on the SP’s record because it has little new to offer voters.

“That is not true. We are taking our achievements to the people regularly. But we are also keeping a comparative study of the two regimes before them so that they make the right choice. What was UP before 2017 and how it has changed after. Be it the power situation, expressways, airports, medical colleges… there is perceptible change. There used to be riots earlier, but now there are no riots. The aim is to tell the voters how Adityanath has transformed the condition and direction of the state,” BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi said.

The SP, however, argues that the repeated invocation of its years in power betrays the BJP’s inability to build the election around its own record.

“This formula of reinforcing history that the BJP is invoking has run its course. First, Akhilesh ji’s regime was better than Adityanath’s. Also, people have already shown in 2024 that they are not buying this narrative. The recently concluded MLC elections have also shown that people are ready to defeat this narrative,” SP Rajya Sabha MP Javed Ali told The Indian Express.

SP spokesperson Fakhrul Hasan said: “We talk about achievements of our regime. They talk about us. It’s a compulsion for them as they have nothing to show in terms of work done. Their sole aim is to communalise the elections. Yesterday also there were slogans of ‘katenge to batenge’ in a BJP meet. They have nothing to do with issues of education, healthcare and employment.”

The Bihar template

The emerging campaign has a recent precedent.

Ahead of the Bihar elections, the NDA faced a similar problem. Nitish Kumar had been in power, barring a brief interruption, for almost two decades. Yet a striking amount of the NDA’s campaign remained focussed on Lalu Prasad and the RJD governments of the 1990s and early 2000s.

At a February 2025 event in Bhagalpur, Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeatedly referred to the RJD as “jungle raaj waale”, while Nitish reminded voters of a time when, according to him, people were afraid to venture out after sunset.

The messaging was sustained. Of 12 campaign videos put out by the JD(U) over two months at the time, six were devoted to recalling “jungle raj”. One was titled “Bhule nahi hain Bihar ke log”; another juxtaposed “jungleraaj ka Champaran” with “NDA ka matlab unnati aur vikas”.

The message to a voter who might have grievances against a government of 20 years was effectively: before deciding whether to change it, remember the alternative.

In UP, the BJP’s depiction of the SP years is broader. SP rule is recalled not merely through Atiq Ahmed or Mukhtar Ansari, but through graveyard expenditure, iftar, riots, the firing on kar sevaks and alleged restrictions surrounding Hindu festivals.