Congress Borrows BJP's Caste Coalition Playbook for Uttar Pradesh

The Congress is assembling a coalition of smaller parties in Uttar Pradesh that draw their base from non-Yadav Other Backward Classes and Dalit communities, a strategy that mirrors the BJP's winning formula in the 2017 and 2022 assembly elections, NDTV reported. These smaller parties delivered the caste engineering that provided the BJP its massive victories, and the Congress now hopes to borrow the same arithmetic.

The party has named Aradhana Misra Mona to lead it into next year's UP polls, according to NDTV. In Punjab, the Congress replaced its state chief with hockey veteran Pargat Singh. But the UP move is sharper: it is an attempt to occupy the social space the BJP has owned since 2017.

The BJP's success in Uttar Pradesh did not come from ideology alone. It came from stitching together dozens of small caste-based parties that represented communities outside the dominant Yadav-Muslim consolidation the Samajwadi Party had relied on. Non-Yadav OBC groups such as Kurmis, Mauryas, Nishads, and Rajbhar, along with Dalit sub-castes, were systematically courted through alliances and seat-sharing. This is the ground Congress now wants to work.

Smaller UP parties are already turning to the Congress, India Today reported, asking for seats from the Congress share within the larger Samajwadi Party-led alliance. That detail matters: the Congress is not building this coalition from a position of strength, but as a junior partner trying to retain relevance inside an existing front. The smaller parties see the Congress as a conduit to electoral resources and are bargaining before the seat-sharing talks harden.

The Arithmetic of Caste Coalitions

Uttar Pradesh sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha, the largest delegation of any state. Its assembly elections set the tone for national politics, and the BJP's dominance there has been the foundation of its parliamentary majorities. A Congress that peels away even a slice of the BJP's non-Yadav OBC and Dalit support would not just hurt the incumbent in Lucknow; it would recalculate the opposition's bargaining power in Delhi.

Badri Narayan, professor at the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, has documented how the BJP's alliance with these smaller parties created a new social bloc. It gave political recognition to castes that had long been treated as appendages to larger formations. The Congress copying this playbook is an admission that the old Congress model, built on upper-caste leadership and a broad but shallow rainbow coalition, no longer works in Uttar Pradesh.

But there is a tension inside the strategy. Gilles Verniers, a political scientist at Ashoka University, has cautioned that Congress's tie-ups with smaller parties risk diluting its own vote share without a distinct caste message. A coalition is not a substitute for a social base. The BJP's smaller allies brought their own organisational networks and ideological coherence; the Congress, for now, is offering little beyond seat adjustments.

Micro-Castes Decide Elections

Sanjay Kumar, director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, has observed that UP elections are now decided by micro-caste coalitions rather than broad ideological swings. That is the lesson of 2017 and 2022, when the BJP's carefully assembled alliance of non-dominant castes overwhelmed the SP's Yadav-Muslim arithmetic. The Congress seems to have absorbed the diagnosis, but the prescription is harder to fill.

In the SP-led alliance, the Congress has a seat share that is still being negotiated. Smaller parties now see that share as a pool from which they can extract seats. This converts the coalition into a transactional marketplace before a single vote is cast. The risk is that the Congress ends up as a platform for other parties' ambitions rather than a force with its own social anchor.

The BJP built its smaller-party network over years, not months. It recruited leaders like Om Prakash Rajbhar and Anupriya Patel with ministerial positions and local organisational support, and it used its ideological machinery to keep the alliance coherent. The Congress has neither the organisational depth nor the ideological glue to replicate that. What it does have is the memory of power and a name that still carries some weight in parts of the state, particularly among Dalits and Muslims who have drifted away from the SP's Yadav centrism.

If the Congress can convert these smaller-party alliances into a durable social coalition, the 2027 UP assembly election would become a genuine three-way contest. That would force the BJP to further consolidate its OBC and Dalit outreach, shifting the welfare and reservation discourse toward the most numerous but least consolidated castes. The central question is whether the Congress is building a social base or merely renting one for a season.

The Long View of UP's Coalition Churn

The Congress has not won a UP assembly election in nearly four decades, and for much of that time it has been a marginal player in the state's politics. The party's decision to court smaller caste-based parties is a return to an earlier logic: in the era of Indira Gandhi, the Congress built a coalition of Brahmins, Dalits, Muslims, and backward castes. That formula collapsed under the weight of Mandal and mandir, and the party never recovered a coherent social base.

The BJP, after 2014, rebuilt the coalition the Congress lost, but with a Hindu nationalist frame that subsumed caste differences. The Congress now seeks the same social coalition without that frame. This is the central contradiction of the new strategy: the smaller parties may bring votes, but they do not bring an ideology that binds those votes together. In a state where identity politics is the only politics, a purely transactional coalition is brittle.

The 2027 election will test whether the Congress can become a genuine pole for non-Yadav OBCs and Dalits, or whether it remains a platform for other parties' ambitions within the SP-led alliance. The smaller parties themselves will judge the Congress by seats, not sermons. Aradhana Misra Mona's first task is to convert the party's new alliances into candidates and workers on the ground. If she fails, the coalition will dissolve before the first vote is counted.