Uttar Pradesh was one of the strongest states for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years. But the party took a serious hit in the state in the 2024 general elections. The results had two painful dimensions for the BJP. One, the loss of seats here deprived it of a clear majority in Parliament. Two, the gauntlet was thrown down by a regional force that the party had twice defeated in assembly polls — in 2017 and 2022.

The 2027 assembly polls now give the BJP an opportunity to avenge its defeat. It has to crack another tough state — West Bengal — between now and then, but the blueprint for UP must have already been finalised. The BJP will likely draw from its recent experience in Bihar, where the party and its allies demolished the Opposition’s carefully crafted Yadav-Mallah-Muslim-non-Paswan-Dalit bloc of caste and minority groups. The BJP did this by building a “Hindutva” coalition of Brahmin-Bhumihar-Kurmi-Manjhi-Paswan and extremely backward castes (EBCs).

Politics in UP is also driven by caste matrices. The BJP deftly managed this in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, retaining the advantage in the 2017 and 2022 assembly polls, albeit with minor cracks. But the Akhilesh-Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP)’s pichra-Dalit-alpsankhyak, or PDA coalition — backward classes, Dalits and minorities — broke the consolidation that the BJP had........

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