On June 22, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath visited his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya’s home in Lucknow. The occasion apparently was a feast thrown by Maurya to celebrate his son Yogesh’s wedding in Raebareli a month ago. Senior RSS leaders, such as sarkaryavah Dattatreya Hosabale, sah sarkaryavah Krishna Gopal and kshetriya pracharak Anil Kumar, and Dinesh Sharma, the other deputy chief minister of UP, were in attendance. Adityanath blessed the newly-wed and exchanged sweets with Maurya.
The optics and political signalling of the event were hard to miss. With the assembly election in UP less than nine months away, the RSS functionaries had come down to Lucknow to try and ease tensions between Adityanath and Maurya. The two have never been at ease with each other throughout the Yogi government’s current term, which began in March 2017. Though they are neighbours, this was the first time Adityanath had dropped in at Maurya’s residence. Only a week ago, Maurya had issued a statement challenging Adityanath. He said the BJP central command had yet to decide who would lead the party in the forthcoming election. After the lunch meeting at his residence, Maurya appeared reconciliatory. “Yogiji will remain our chief minister. There is no room for any controversy on this,” he said.
IMAGE OVERHAUL
A rapprochement between Adityanath and Maurya has been in the works for long. “Senior RSS and BJP leaders have been trying to get Adityanath and Maurya to come together in public to dispel concerns among party functionaries and workers of a rift between the two. They also wanted to send out a message to the people that all is well in the BJP and no caste fault lines exist in the government,” says a top state BJP functionary, requesting anonymity.
The BJP needs this show of unity before the UP assembly election, especially in light of the demoralising recent poll reverses in West Bengal. The party had stormed to power in UP, in 2017, with a massive mandate (312 of 403 seats on its own; 325 with allies) but is by no means guaranteed a repeat performance in 2022. Through visits by BJP and RSS leaders, an earnest exercise has begun to gauge the perception of the state government and fix problems. BJP national general secretary (organisation) B.L. Santhosh arrived in Lucknow on May 31 on a three-day tour. After taking feedback from party leaders and ministers and meeting the chief minister, he praised the government’s handling of the second Covid wave and its vaccination drive.
Public endorsement of the Adityanath government aside, Santhosh’s assessment report, submitted to BJP national president J.P. Nadda, identified various problems, such as factionalism in the party unit, poor coordination between the party and the government, and organisational inertia. The BJP has since been busy tightening up its affairs in UP, with Santhosh revisiting Lucknow on June 21 to discuss assembly poll preparations. On June 19, the BJP had appointed MLC Arvind Kumar Sharma as vice-president in the state unit, putting to rest speculation about the former bureaucrat’s possible induction in the Adityanath cabinet, much against the wishes of the chief minister. Soon after his appointment, Sharma wrote to UP BJP chief Swatantra Dev Singh, rallying behind Adityanath. ‘Under Yogi Adityanath’s leadership, the BJP will win more seats in the 2022 assembly election [than it did in 2017],’ his letter stated.
Political observers in the state say the BJP has been making a concerted effort to avoid any incident that projects Adityanath’s position as weakening or gives a sense that the party may fight the assembly election under some other leader. “After winning the 2017 poll, the RSS and BJP tried to polarise the Hindu vote by appointing Yogi Adityanath as chief minister. No BJP leader is better placed to play the Hindutva card in the forthcoming election, particularly after work on the Ram temple in Ayodhya has begun during his term in office. It explains why Yogi is being projected as the BJP’s face in the UP election,” says Prof. S.K. Dwivedi, former head of the political science department at Lucknow University.
Astrategy to further boost Adityanath’s image as a Hindutva mascot was reportedly firmed up at the BJP core group meeting held on June 21 at the chief minister’s residence. The meeting was attended by the RSS’s Hosabale and Krishna Gopal. Within days, it was decided at a state cabinet meeting that a 19-km-long, four-lane bypass road, costing Rs 200 crore, will be constructed in Saharanpur district in western UP to improve connectivity to the Shakumbhari Devi temple, revered by many Hindus in the state and where Adityanath had offered prayers before his 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign. He is expected to kickstart his assembly poll campaign too from the same temple. In another indication that Hindutva will remain a core BJP plank in the election, the June 25 cabinet meeting approved the setting up of pilgrimage development boards for Chitrakoot and Vindhyachal Shakti Peeth, a pilgrimage spot in Mirzapur district.
The cabinet’s decisions have been decried by the opposition as communal. “A chief minister who talked of equitable progress is discriminating on religious grounds even in development work. Not a single development work announced by the BJP government in Hindu pilgrimage centres has been completed,” said Rajendra Chaudhary, chief spokesperson of the Samajwadi Party (SP).
Mohsin Raza, the UP minister for minority welfare, Muslim Waqf and Haj, refutes the charge. “The government has allocated over Rs 200 crore to modernise madrasas. Under a scheme prepared on the CM’s instructions, IIT and IIM faculty will participate in online training of madrasa teachers,” he says.
DALIT CARD
The BJP is also making the right noises when it comes to Dalits, hoping to erase the bad press received over the UP administration’s handling of the rape and murder case of a Dalit woman in Hathras district in September 2020. As if taking a cue from the erstwhile BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) regime, which had erected a string of monuments of Dalit icons in Lucknow, the Adityanath government, on June 25, approved the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Cultural Centre in the state capital. On June 29, President Ram Nath Kovind laid the foundation stone of the Rs 55 crore project, which will come up over 1.3 acres in Aishbagh. BSP supremo Mayawati has called the project an election stunt by the BJP.
Dalits constitute about 21 per cent of UP’s 200 million people. Once firmly behind Mayawati, they have over the years gradually shifted to the BJP. In the 2019 Lok Sabha poll, the BJP and its ally Apna Dal won 15 of 17 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes in UP. Of the 86 reserved seats in the assembly, the BJP won 70 in 2017.
Among Dalits in the state, Jatavs form the biggest subgroup (over 50 per cent). In an all-too-apparent move to woo them, Adityanath, on June 18, revamped the UP SC-ST Commission and appointed Dr Rambabu Harit as its chairman. The post had been vacant for the past two years. Dr Harit is a Jatav and belongs to Agra, a Dalit stronghold. With his appointment, the BJP has sought to challenge Mayawati’s hold over the Jatav community. “With the BSP on the decline under Mayawati, the party’s Dalit supporters are in a dilemma. Yogi Adityanath has sought to cash in on this by appointing a Jatav leader as chairman of the SC-ST Commission,” says Lalji Prasad Nirmal, chairman of the UP Scheduled Castes Finance and Development Corporation.
On an appointments spree, the state government also picked up BJP leader Jaswant Saini for the post of chairman of the UP State Commission for Backward Classes. Saini is a resident of Saharanpur. “Saharanpur, the westernmost district of UP, is very important politically. With an eye on the 2022 election, Adityanath has strategically decided to build a four-lane road to the Shakumbhari Devi temple and appoint a leader of the Saini community, the main backward caste in western UP, as the OBC panel chief,” says Dr Manoj Siwach, associate professor of economics at Meerut College.
PARTY PRESSURES
Adityanath is also trying to tone up the administration following complaints by his ministers and BJP leaders to Santhosh about government officials turning a deaf ear to their grievances. While reviewing development work in Varanasi recently, the chief minster suspended Purvanchal Vidyut Vitaran Nigam managing director Saroj Kumar. The official, local BJP officials claim, had been sitting on electricity-related complaints. This was followed by state chief secretary R.K. Tiwari directing all district magistrates to address on priority the complaints of elected representatives against erring officials.
The SP’s Chaudhary says it is too little intervention that has come too late in the day. “There is widespread public dissatisfaction about the working style of Yogi Adityanath. If the BJP contests elections under his leadership, it will only benefit our party,” he claims.
To improve synergy between his government and the party, Adityanath is reportedly keen on accommodating BJP workers and functionaries in the 500-odd state corporations, boards and committees. The BJP has prepared a list of over 5,000 workers who will be placed in these bodies before August. Workarounds are planned to have political cases registered against BJP workers during the previous SP and BSP regimes dropped. The move is intended to energise and motivate the BJP rank and file in the run-up to an election that will not only determine Adityanath’s political fortunes but also the BJP’s prospects in the general election in 2024.
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