Only three Uttar Pradesh CMs have completed their tenure and two of them did not get a second consecutive term. Why Yogi Adityanath could make history if he does
When Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath completes five years in office on March 19, 2022, he will be only the third state CM to complete a full term in office. If the BJP wins the state elections on March 10, Adityanath would have made history. The state has never returned a full-term chief minister to office. Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav are the only two leaders to do so. The last CM to return to power was the Congress’s N.D. Tiwari in 1985 but he served two truncated terms. Yogi’s record could thus be an impressive one in India’s largest, most populous and electorally most significant state
Anti-incumbency runs high in a state of 230 million people with a population as large as Pakistan. Parties have to balance aspirations, caste equations and development to make a go of it. Even relatively smaller states like Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala have failed to get this matrix right. In 2016, J. Jayalalitha bucked the trend with her personal charisma and welfarism to return to power. In 2021, the CPI(M)’s Pinarayi Vijayan did the same in Kerala.
In UP, the BJP has not lowered its guard. It has wooed voters with politically correct social equations, Hindutva and aggressive welfarism. The saffron party hopes its ‘double engine government’ slogan will sway voters into bringing Hindutva’s biggest icon after Narendra Modi back to Lucknow’s Lal Bahadur Shastri Bhavan.
