The legislative poll in the most populous state of India will be a life-size test to measure the impact of the health and economic crisis on the popularity of Narendra Modi.
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All fires are focused on Uttar Pradesh, considered the barometer of Indian national political life. This state, the most populous of the country (230 million inhabitants) and one of the poorest, renews its regional assembly in the framework of legislative elections that take place in seven phases: the “up”, as they say In India, is so great that voting operations range from February 10 to March 10. Voters of four other Indian union states also go to the polls: Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and Punjab.
This vote is a life-size test for the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, two years of the general elections, scheduled in 2024. The Uttar Pradesh, which has sacred cities on the banks of the Ganges or Yamuna, like Bénaès. , Mathura or Ayodhya, is the state that sends the most elected officials to the national parliament: eighty deputies out of 544. By comparison, another state such as Maharasthra, whose capital is Bombay, only forty- eight. To guarantee his retention, Narendra Modi therefore needs to win a clear victory in the up.
“The Uttar Pradesh has always had a special meaning and weighs more than any other on national politics. What is played in this state concerns the country as a whole, it’s a lot more than a regional scene” Analysis Gilles Verniers, Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, near Delhi. Sign of its importance: Uttar Pradesh gave seven prime ministers to the country, of which Modi, elected twice as a member of the district of Varanasi (Benares).
The issue is such that, according to the Hindustan Times, one of the main Indian daily newspapers, “March 10, 2022 could be among the most important days of India’s contemporary political history. C is one day that will define the immediate political future of the country, and which will draw the contours of 2024. “
In 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (the Indian People’s Party, BJP), the training of Narendra Modi, had won a brilliant victory by attracting not only the high castes, but also the lower castes. The Prime Minister had then decided, to the general surprise, to place an extremist Hindu monk at the head of the state, Yogi Adityanath, which is positioned both political and religious chief. This 48-year-old single is the leader of the Monastery of Gorakhpur, his electoral district.
On the political level, he made Uttar Pradesh a Hindutva laboratory, a supregist ideology theorized in the 1920s, which advocates the superiority of Hindus on the believers of other religions, in particular of the Islam. Its campaign slogan, “80% of the population compared to 20% criminals”, aims without appointing them the Muslims, who represent a fifth of the population of Swedar Pradesh.
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