SP-RLD row over chavanni flips open caste fault lines ahead of U.P. poll

The modest chavanni – the now-obsolete 25-paise coin – is gaining currency in western Uttar Pradesh ahead of the State election following a war of words over loyalty and caste identity between Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president Jayant Chaudhary and his former ally, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav.The conflict escalated after Mr. Yadav made a veiled jibe targeting Mr. Chaudhary. “We turned a chavanni into a rupee, and yet they left us,” the SP chief said at a recent event in Lucknow. This was a direct reference to Mr. Chaudhary’s own famous 2022 declaration, when he resisted Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) initial overtures during the 2022 poll by saying, “I am not a chavanni that will flip.”After subsequently flipping to join the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Mr. Chaudhary became a prime target for the Opposition.At the time, he defended the move because the BJP-led government conferred the Bharat Ratna on former Prime Minister and his grandfather, Chaudhary Charan Singh, before the election.Jat loyalties in the region are broadly governed by farming issues, respect for Mr Chaudhary’s family and Hindutva, and perhaps that’s why Mr. Chaudhary explained his political switch to the electorate during the Lok Sabha election with a cryptic line, “Main palta nahin hoon, maine palti di hai, ise patakhni marna kehte hain (I didn’t turn my back or betray anyone; I executed a strategic move to slam my political rivals.”The Jats read it in two ways. Those nursing a grudge against Mulayam Singh Yadav – for betraying the trust of his mentor Charan Singh and scuttling his son Ajit Singh’s chances of becoming U.P.’s Chief Minister after the Janata Dal came to power in December 1989 – saw Mr. Chaudhary’s flip to the BJP as a perfect move. And farmers who questioned the silence of the BJP’s Jat face, Sanjeev Balyan, during the farm agitation saw it as a strategic manoeuvre to reclaim Jat politics from the BJP while remaining in the NDA fold. Mr Balyan, who defeated then RLD Supremo Ajit Singh in 2019, lost his seat in 2024. Two years later, the ground has shifted. In SP’s electoral narrative, Mr. Chaudhary is in the Rajya Sabha because of its largesse and should have resigned when the RLD joined the NDA. The breakdown happened over the number of seats, but SP sympathisers underline that the BJP left only two seats for RLD in the Lok Sabha poll while the SP was ready to give five more. Out of nine MLAs, RLD has two Muslim MLAs in the Jat belt, and the SP seems keen to win them and their community support base. The party is also reaching out to Gurjars to make a choice.Despite joining hands with the BJP, Mr. Chaudhary hasn’t given up on his bhaichara plank, but the current friction will make it difficult for him to hold on to it. It is favourable for the BJP as it will help it polarise the election in western U.P. For, after RLD’s rise in 2022, Muslim farmers once again saw Jat farmers as their shield. There is a section in the ruling party in the State that feels that the tie-up with the RLD didn’t help, as the INDIA bloc secured six of the eight seats in the heart of the sugarcane belt in 2024. But observers feel the BJP’s central leadership bought peace at the U.P. border by aligning with RLD, and in that sense it is a successful move because the Jat farmers had packed their lathis and parked their tractors off the National Highway 9. In its recently constituted Parliamentary Board, RLD has included Yudhvir Singh, farmer leader and the general secretary of the Tikait faction of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, as a special invitee.RLD insiders believe the party stemmed the impending disaster from the BJP’s internal fight and is seeking a bigger slice of the pie. With the SP, RLD contested 33 Assembly seats. It helps that the Jats are agitated against the SP because now even those who feel Chaudhary Charan Singh saw Mulayam Singh Yadav as his political heir in his lifetime cannot ignore the SP chief’s personal attacks. They are using the hukka bharna (doing the bidding), a cultural metaphor of subservience, to describe Mulayam Singh’s respect for his mentor.Meanwhile, SP’s Jat leaders are getting into semantics to deflect the issue and are invoking Charan Singh, who cautioned against the entry of diya bati (the symbol of the Jan Sangh) in villages.There was a time when Mr. Chaudhary described the alliance between SP, Bahujan Samaj Party, and RLD as a tie-up that best reflected the State’s social fabric. He resisted projecting himself as a Jat leader in public. However, the current fracas, where SP State president Shyamlal Pal mocked the RLD leadership by saying that they “taught them (Jats) the ABCD of politics”, has forced him to invoke his Jat background through a thinly veiled post on X, where he said it would have been better had people named him rather than targeting the community.Playing on the letters, Mr. Chaudhary remarked last week at a rally in Saharanpur, “G for Ganna and J, you know”, warning the RLD would trap the SP right between the two. SP’s Gurjar leadership responded, “If J stands for Jat, G has to be Gurjar.”Political observers feel after resisting for a long time, Mr. Chaudhary had to bow to a large chunk of his vote bank’s demand, which saw the community’s future with the BJP after the Muzaffarnagar communal riots. However, after two years in government, where he is Minister of State for Education, the same section that didn’t support him enough when he led protests against the Agniveer recruitment is questioning his silence on Gen-Z protests against paper leaks and rewinding reels of his speeches during the farmer protests and the police action against him in Hathras after the rape and murder of a Dalit girl. The recent murder of Haryanvi singer Ankit Balyan in Shamli is seen as yet another provocation for him to get into ‘action’ mode.The big question in the days to come is whether Mr. Chaudhary will shed the chavanni tag by making the BJP cede seats worth a rupee for him.