Lucknow:
The Uttar Pradesh "snake of victory" shows that a party or coalition will need 35 per cent of the total votes to get a majority in the state, where assembly elections are being held in seven phases. Majority in the 403-member UP assembly is 202 seats.
In 2012, when the Samajwadi Party's Akhilesh Yadav rode a wave to victory, his party had needed far less, 29 per cent vote share, to win 226 seats. Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party or BSP with 26 per cent votes could win just 80 seats. In many seats that the Samajwadi Party had won, the difference between its candidate and the number 2, mostly the BSP candidate, was less than 1 per cent.
But that year, the two regional giants were the primary actors in UP, with national parties the BJP and the Congress coming in a distant third and fourth.
Two years later, in 2014, the BJP flipped UP's politics over with a Modi wave, sweeping 73 of the state's 80 parliament seats along with ally Apna Dal - 71 on its own - equal to 337 assembly seats. Its vote share, a whopping 43 per cent.
The party hopes to replicate that in the assembly elections this year and end a 15-year drought in UP.
The Samajwadi Party's 22 per cent vote share in 2014 earned it five seats - equal to 42 assembly seats. The Congress' eight per cent vote share got it two Lok Sabha seats, that of party chief Sonia Gandhi and her son and deputy Rahul Gandhi - equal to 15 assembly seats.
This time the Samajwadi Party has partnered with the Congress in a bid to consolidate their overlapping vote banks - like the Muslim vote - and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has said he expects the coalition to win 300 seats. It will need upwards of 40 per cent vote share for that in what is seen as a close three-cornered election.
For the BJP to win in 2017, it will need to hold on to the new voters it acquired in 2014, most prominently the Jat vote. Traditionally 10 per cent Jats, concentrated in western UP, have voted for the BJP. But in the deeply polarised national elections, held months after deadly communal violence between Jats and Muslims in 2013, 75 per cent Jats voted for the BJP.
The BJP also got 75 per cent of the forward caste vote; traditionally 40 per cent of UP's forward caste voters have voted for the party. It also benefited from extra votes from non-Jatav Dalit voters and non-Yadav voters from Other Backward Castes or OBCs.
For the complete analysis of UP elections,
click here to watch the entire episode of
Battleground: Uttar Pradesh - Part 1.