The result of the 2024 general election was, by any account, a watershed moment in India’s recent political history. Belying the predictions of the pundit class and the exit polls, Narendra Modi’s BJP failed to win an outright majority, leaving it reliant on mercurial allies to rule for a third straight term. The opposition bloc, on the other hand, surpassed expectations to deliver an impressive performance. One key reason was the remarkable showing of Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh.

The party won 37 of the state’s 80 parliamentary seats—a gain of 32 seats from the previous election—and helped its chief INDIA bloc ally, the Congress, win another six.

How did the Samajwadi Party pull this off?

That’s the focus of our July cover story by Sunil Kashyap.

In the main, Kashyap notes, it was a network of caste alliances that carried the party in Uttar Pradesh and not just a rejection of Hindutva or economic pain, as has been generally argued.

The key to understanding the party’s historic victory, Kashyap writes, “lies in a temple much of the media was not looking at during the campaign. On 6 May, a day before the third phase of polling, Akhilesh began his campaigning for the day in Kannauj with a visit to the Siddhapeeth Baba Gauri Shankar Mahadev Temple. Soon after, a video went viral of BJP party workers cleaning the temple with water from the Ganga, in an attempt to purify the temple, which apparently had been polluted by the OBC leader’s visit. The SP leader IP Singh immediately struck out, saying that the ‘BJP believes that backward, Dalit, deprived and exploited people have no right to worship in a Hindu temple’. On the defensive, BJP leaders claimed that Yadav was ‘an electoral Hindu’ and was allowed into the temple, but that he had been accompanied by Muslims, which is why the purification ritual took place.”

The incident had a silent but deep impact on backward caste voters, Kashyap notes, “not just Yadavs but also the plethora of castes stuck between the BJP’s claims of Hindudom and the SP’s underlining of their backward status”.

“For the backward castes and, often, the parties that represent them, elections are first seen as a space to fight for samman—dignity and self-respect—and only then as one for rozgar—employment. Given that elections in South Asia have always been about caste assertion, a victory for the latter will be meaningless without the former. A simple study of social media posts by Mayawati and Akhilesh through the length of the 2024 campaign indicates their understanding of this. In an election that was very much about identity, an issue that liberal upper-caste sections of the opposition tend to get queasy about discussing, the SP’s winning campaign made clear what it really meant to be Hindu for a majority under that umbrella.”..

The caste alliances that won Uttar Pradesh

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