Uttar Pradesh has always been the epicenter of Indian politics, owing to the fact that it sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha-the highest among all the states. In the 15th Lok Sabha elections this year, U.P. staged an unexpected turnover of votes favoring Congress. After a long time the national party could ground its feet in the state. From managing to get nine seats in 2004 to scoring 21 seats in 2009, Congress made a giant leap in the political “akhada” of U.P., where Mulayam and Mayawati failed. Congress subordinates acknowledge this victory to Rahul Gandhi’s efforts in the state. To some extent this is true. Rahul did travel a lot in U.P. and spread an aura of assurance among the people, which was irrespective of the normal divides, on which U.P. has been surviving now for a long time. Today it is not just the poor villagers of Amethi and Raebareily who relate to him and consider him the future leader, but also a large irritated populace of Pradesh prefers Rahul over the divisive standards of other parties.
But there were other reasons too for the surprising results in U.P. BSP’s social engineering collapsed and anti-incumbency and offering seats to goons shot back. SP’s shaking hands with long time rival Kalyan Singh pulled away its Muslim votes. BJP was just left in confusion to figure out what went wrong. With 10 seats in hand it was either the seat sharing deal with Ajit Singh or Varun Gandhi’s Pilibhit chapter which backfired. In areas like
