Uttar Pradesh | Akhilesh's wagon goes west

As the war geography for 2027 gets drawn, the Samajwadi Party (SP) has made an early strategic choice. By opting for a rally in Dadri to launch his campaign, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav has signalled that western Uttar Pradesh is where the contest will get decided. With 140-odd seats spread across 32 districts—nearly 35 per cent of the 403-seat assembly—this arc has long been UP’s political hinge. More than bulk, what makes for a dynamic essential to control is its dense mix of castes and communities, with complex interrelations. This is where the SP is crafting a sharpened plan.

A POLITICAL COMPLEX

With Jats, Gujjars, Muslims and a rainbow of backward classes, group dynamics here are inflected both by identity-based and economic power relations. Farmer politics runs deep through its sugarcane belt. A strong middle-class Hindu vote in Noida and Ghaziabad leans saffronward. The older towns in their shadow also host an evolving Muslim lower middle class, some moving up from farm labour status. A strong Ambedkarite mobilisation of Dalits also colours the region deeply.

This entire social complex also has a history of trauma by now, fault lines that continue to influence political alignments. It’s this mixed soil that the SP is trying to till, with a persuasive, comprehensive argument against BJP rule. It inaugurates a sustained campaign with a pan-UP sweep, with the fixed leg of the compass anchored in western UP.

At Dadri, Akhilesh raised questions on unemployment, farmer distress, and what he described as a rending of the social fabric. From ‘bulldozer justice’ to other law-and-order methods, he framed the BJP’s governance as one that prioritises confrontation. This venture into the difficult art of social alliance-making intends to persuade voters to respond instead to common livelihood issues.

The 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots are the unspoken backdrop here. Efforts by the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) since 2019 had helped suture the Jat-Muslim divide to a degree. But it hitched wagons with the BJP in 2024. The SP has spotted a gap to fill. Thus was coined the ‘Samajwadi Samaanta Bhaichara (Socialist Equality Fraternity) Rally’, which mobilised Jats, Gujjars, Muslims and Yadavs equally. Gujjars, first among those still receptive to Hindutva in these parts, have emerged as a key target of the SP’s broader non-Yadav OBC strategy. Influential across many seats in western UP, Dadri typifies it—at 30 per cent, they are the largest vote bloc here.

Akhilesh’s outreach was not without a resort to heady identity politics, centring around the 9th century ruler Mihir Bhoj—the subject of a hot patent dispute between Gujjars and Rajputs. In 2021, a statue unveiled by CM Yogi Adityanath here had ‘Gurjar’ removed at the last minute so as not to offend Rajputs. That had led to protests and blackening of posters. Akhilesh explicitly backed the Gujjar claim and promised a Mihir Bhoj statue on the Gomti riverfront in Lucknow.

On farmer issues, he promised compensation at market rates for acquired land, accusing the BJP of underpaying farmers while congratulating itself for ‘empty’ airport projects.

In 2024, the SP had done well in several Jat- and Gujjar-heavy seats. Still, it’s a steep challenge. In the 2022 assembly election, the BJP had won 93 of western UP’s 140 seats.