Decode Politics: Why Tejashwi could not steal a march on BJP like Akhilesh did

While the incumbent BJP-led NDA maintained its supremacy in Bihar in the Lok Sabha polls by winning 30 seats out of 40 as against the INDIA bloc’s 9 seats, it was beaten by the Opposition alliance in Uttar Pradesh, the most crucial heartland state.

In UP, out of 80 seats the BJP won 33 seats with its allies RLD and Apna Dal (Soneylal) getting, respectively, two and one, while the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) bagged 37 seats with its INDIA partner Congress winning six seats.

In Bihar, RJD leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, son of party chief Lalu Prasad and ex-deputy chief minister, spearheaded the Opposition’s campaign, while in UP Akhilesh led his party’s charge from the front.

Although the RJD improved its tally from the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when it had drawn a blank, Tejashwi clearly could not replicate Akhilesh’s feat in his state. Here are five major reasons why Tejashwi could not get the better of the BJP like Akhilesh did:

In the 2019 polls, the SP had won just 5 seats in UP as it had then contested 37 of the state’s 80 seats as part of an alliance with the BSP.

In the current polls, the SP contested 62 seat while its ally Congress fought from 17 seats.

Confident of retaining its core Muslim-Yadav (MY) vote base and seeking to make inroads into the votes of non-Yadav OBCs, who were seen to be consolidated in favour of the BJP, the SP fielded only five candidates from the Yadav community – all from party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav’s family. In 2019, the SP had fielded 10 Yadav faces among its 37 candidates. This time, the SP also fielded only four Muslim candidates. Akhilesh, in fact, coined a new slogan for the vote base he banked on, expanding from “M-Y” or Muslim-Yadav to “PDA” or “Pichde (backward classes or