The Cockroach Janta Party's protests at Jantar Mantar have wound down. But the national conversation they reignited - over social justice, equity and merit - hasn't gone anywhere. And Uttar Pradesh, heading into its consequential 2027 assembly election, may be the only state where that conversation collides directly with hard electoral arithmetic. Three forces are converging here at once: the BJP's upper-caste base, the Samajwadi Party's expanding caste-outreach strategy, and a national debate on social justice. Few other states carry all three at this scale, or with these stakes.
The Numbers
Brahmins account for close to 10 per cent of Uttar Pradesh's population, with the community concentrated most heavily in the central and eastern parts of the state. Add Rajputs, Baniyas and other upper-caste groups, and the bloc becomes electorally significant well beyond its numeric share - a bloc that has voted overwhelmingly with the BJP through the last two election cycles.
The data bears this out. In the 2022 Assembly election, CSDS-Lokniti's post-poll survey found that 79 per cent of upper-caste (Brahmin, Rajput and Vaishya) voters backed the NDA, against just 16 per cent for the Opposition alliance. Two years later, in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, that loyalty held firm at the individual community level - the same survey found that the upper-caste voter bloc still largely favoured the BJP, with close to nine in 10 Rajput voters backing the party.
Notably, though, the 2024 result also showed the coalition arithmetic shifting elsewhere - the Opposition INDIA alliance won 43 of UP's seats to the BJP's 33, powered by OBC, Dalit and Muslim consolidation, partly on the back of a narrative around constitutional and reservation change that the BJP struggled to counter. In other words: upper-caste loyalty to the BJP has not cracked yet. But the coalition around it has already shown it can be beaten.
The Stress Test
That loyalty had never really been tested until the UGC equity row early this year - a national controversy that landed with particular force in UP. A magistrate in Bareilly resigned in protest and close to a dozen BJP members in Lucknow left the party. Neither reads as manufactured Opposition noise; both point to a genuine, even if narrow, fracture within the base the BJP has relied on for a decade. In fact, eastern UP is where this will likely be decided most - the highest pockets of Brahmin presence, and also Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's home turf. Any erosion in Brahmin loyalty here cuts closest to the CM's own backyard.
Two Brahmin Faces, Two Strategies - The Ticket Count
The BJP's answer has a name: Manoj Pandey, once a close aide to Akhilesh Yadav and known in SP circles as the "Chanakya of Raebareli", now a minister in the Yogi cabinet and one of the party's key upper caste faces heading into 2027. The Samajwadi Party's counter has also taken shape. Akhilesh Yadav chose Mata Prasad Pandey, a seven-time MLA and a two-time Assembly Speaker, as Leader of Opposition - a visible signal that the party's post-2024 social engineering, built around the PDA formula (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak), is now explicitly being widened to include a section of upper castes. Akhilesh has framed this shift as extending PDA's "A" to include Agada, or upper castes, alongside the backward classes and minorities the acronym was built for. Akhilesh has also appeared at events honouring Harishankar Tiwari, a veteran Brahmin political figure who hailed from the CM's own bastion of Gorakhpur - a symbolic gesture aimed at the same constituency.
The numbers tell the story. In 2022, contesting 402 of UP's 403 seats, the SP-led alliance (SP, SBSP and Apna Dal-K) fielded 40 Brahmin candidates - 51 per cent of all its upper-caste nominees that year. The BJP, by comparison, gave out 68 Brahmin tickets in 2022, the highest of any single dominant caste on its list. Both parties, in other words, already treat the Brahmin vote as a serious contest, not a token gesture - the question for 2027 is whether the SP's share moves meaningfully higher.
The BSP, historically the third claimant to this vote, is not sitting this out either. Ahead of the 2022 election, Mayawati had already launched a campaign - led by party general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra from Ayodhya - aimed at persuading Brahmin voters that the BJP could not be trusted with their interests. That effort did not move the 2022 numbers much, but it establishes that Brahmin outreach in UP is now a three-way contest - one that could be a defining aspect of the upcoming elections.
The 2007 Precedent, Unanswered Questions
There is a reason every party in UP takes this seriously. In 2007, Mayawati's BSP gave tickets to a record 86 Brahmin candidates as part of its "sarvjan" social-engineering formula - a Dalit-Brahmin coalition that delivered a full majority (206 of 403 seats) and is still cited as proof that Brahmin voters in UP are not permanently fixed to any one party, given the right conditions and messaging. Whether 2027 offers those conditions is the open question.
There are questions that will be critical both for voter turnout and the final outcome. Does the Samajwadi Party's Brahmin outreach actually translate into votes, or does it stay at the level of visible sympathy without conversion? Does Manoj Pandey's presence in the BJP hold voters in place, or does the UGC-related sentiment outweigh it? Will Akhilesh Yadav back his outreach with a much higher ticket count in 2027 than the 40 the SP fielded in 2022? And finally, if the SP and Congress form an alliance for 2027, what position does Congress take on the UGC row and reservation more broadly? Taken together, answers to these questions may be the single biggest swing factor in what is shaping up to be Uttar Pradesh's most closely contested election in over a decade.
(Gaurie Dwivedi is Executive Editor at NDTV)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
