THE pitched battle for Varanasi is reaching its peak as the D-day is approaching fast. This part of the eastern Uttar Pradesh will go to polls on May 12. BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is contesting from here. He is facing Arvind Kejriwal of Aam Aadmi Party and Ajay Rai of Congress. Modi addressed a massive rally here the other day and led a road show, covering a five kilometre distance in the city in three and half hours as a protest against the Election Commission’s refusal to let him hold a rally in a communally sensitive area of the constituency.

Modi is also contesting from Vadodra (Baroda) in Gujarat which is considered a safe seat for him. He has been the chief minister of the state since 2001 winning four state assembly elections in a row. Though Modi can be sure of reaching Lok Sabha from Vadodra, the Varanasi contest is important for him and his party from many aspects.

Varanasi, also known as Benares, is the spiritual capital of India. It is a holy place for Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism as well. Modi’s victory here can be played up as a ‘divine sanction’ to the party that has thrived in the secular India on the Hindutva concept in past two decades. But there is certainly more to it than the subtle manoeuvres of the political imagination of a supposedly devout electorate.

Varanasi is in eastern part of the most populous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. With a population of 200 million, the state is a little bigger than Pakistan. It has the biggest share of 80 in the 543-seat Lok Sabha pie. No party in India can think of ruling the central government without making it big in UP and the treacherous political terrain of the state has never been a cakewalk for any party.

In 2009 Lok Sabha elections, four parties had swept the bulk of seats and votes in UP and BJP had ranked only the fourth, winning only 10 seats and securing 17.5 per cent of votes. Congress had done only marginally better, polling 18.5 per cent of votes, but was able to translate it into 21 seats.

The top two parties which collectively won over half of the Lok Sabha seats of the state, were local parties. Samajwadi Party that currently rules the state is categorised by the Election Commission as a state party while the other, Bahujan Samaj Party, has marginal presence only in one other state besides UP.

The centrality of the two parties to the UP politics was affirmed in the state assembly elections held in 2012 when the two shared among themselves 304 of the 403 member provincial legislature with BJP bagging 47 and Congress a paltry 28. The two biggest parties of UP champion the cause of lower castes that are legally categorised as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. Though their political interests and social boundaries are fragmented further, they collectively form the majority of the electorate.

The lower castes are frustrated with India’s grand old party, Congress, for its stark failure to turn their fortunes but they cannot pin any hopes on the BJP whose politics is entrenched in upper caste Hindu ideology. BJP understands that its ideological strength is its political weakness. It had in recent past tried to strike an alliance with Bahujan Samaj Party to tap into the ‘condemned’ but lucrative vote bank of low castes. The party success has however been less than impressive.

Samajwadi Party, strikes a chord with Congress and has been providing ‘outside support’ to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance at the centre. Its leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son and the sitting Chief Minister of UP, Akhilesh Yadav have earned Modi’s wrath throughout the campaign.

In the 2014 elections, none of the four has a political alliance with the other. In the words of senior resider editor of Hindustan Times, Sunita Arun, “the egocentric politics of the three secular parties (SP, BSP and Congress) seems to be helping BJP”.

There is however another vote bank in UP that Modi is finding hard to break into, its 18.5 per cent Muslims. In the Varanasi constituency too, they are estimated to form between a fifth to a fourth of electorate. BJP’s brief success in UP has been around the time of Babri Mosque incident.

BJP started its 2014 bid to win UP by appointing Modi’s closest confidant Amit Shah as the campaign manager in May last year. Shah who is the general secretary of BJP is accused of murders and masterminding fake encounters in Gujarat. Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in its Muzaffarnagar district in August-September the same year taking lives and raising communal tensions.

Though it is not easy to point the accusing finger at one person but Amit Shah has tried to rub salt into the communal wounds and attempted to mint some political capital in the present campaign. He told a gathering of Jats, who had rioted with Muslims in Muzaffarnagar, that they should vote for BJP to take revenge. He was banned from addressing more rallies by the EC. The ban was removed after Shah apologised.

But playing the anti-Muslim communal card in today’s UP probably has greater chances of backfiring than raising your political capital. UP is also known as the swing state. In the 2012 state assembly elections here, a vote swing of a few percentage points switched fortunes from BSP to SP. Samajwadi Party added just 3 per cent votes to its 2007 vote share of 26 per cent and raised its seat tally from just 97 to a comfortable majority of 224. Most critiques believe that Samajwadi success rested on its winning over of Muslim voters.

Since a Lok Sabha seat comprises five state assembly seats, finding the right balance becomes an even more precarious job. The BJP realises that it just can’t bully its way into this china shop. In a symbolic move on Tuesday Modi shared the stage with a well-known Muslim freedom fighter, Nizamuddin while addressing a rally at Rohaniya, Varanasi, and touched the feet of 103-old former member of Azad Hind Fauj led by nationalist hero Subhash Chandra Bose.

But Modi’s new found ‘appeasement’ of Muslims might be too little too late as many are thought to have already accepted the Aam Aadmi Party as a viable new choice. The party’s leader Arvind Kejriwal is contesting Modi on the Varanasi seat. His anti-communal, anti-corruption stances and a simplistic campaign focusing more on direct one-to-one contacts led by his army of charged volunteers is making a difference.

In a way the contest here is also between the old style divisive politics and the fresh ways of AAP. A defeat for Kejriwal, who is only contesting from Varanasi will not only stop him from reaching the parliament, it will make the Modi-style politics a breather for some time.