BJP can’t afford to let UP slip out of its hands

Neerja Chowdhury

Senior Political Commentator

YOU can cock a snook at the Prime Minister if you are a Mamata Banerjee. But not if you are a CM of the BJP, not even if you are Yogi Adityanath, a Hindutva icon most in demand after Narendra Modi.

Yogi Adityanath went to Delhi last week to sue for peace. The upshot of the visit: he agreed to go in for a cabinet reshuffle he had been resisting. The BJP brass read out the riot act to him about all that had gone wrong in UP.

Unless the situation spins out of control, Yogi Adityanath will continue as the chief minister and lead the party into elections. For an alternative at this juncture is a risky proposition with only seven to eight months left for the polls. The Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the BJP president have gone into the damage control mode.

Very few BJP MLAs reportedly spoke in Adityanath’s favour to party leaders BL Santhosh and Radha Mohan Singh who were sent to Lucknow to ascertain their views. They flayed his mishandling of the second wave of Covid, for working through a handful of bureaucrats and ignoring MLAs and ministers. There were complaints, and these are long standing ones, about Adityanath being partial to the community he belongs to, the Rajputs, known to be as aggressive as the Yadavs when they are in power. This has alienated the Brahmins, who are large in number in UP (around 12 per cent) and traditional supporters of the BJP.

The cabinet reshuffle in Lucknow is expected to give an important role to AK Sharma, a bureaucrat-turned-politician who is a confidant of the Prime Minister, sent to UP to be his eyes and ears in Lucknow. Sharma resigned as a secretary in the Union government earlier this year, and was made a BJP MLC. The buzz was that the PM wanted him to be made the deputy chief minister and be given the Home department. Yogi Adityanath had so far resisted this move.

The prospective reshuffle in Lucknow is also expected to give a berth to Jitin Prasada, who left the Congress to join the BJP. Like AK Sharma, he too is expected to be brought in as an MLC in July.

Jitin Prasada’s exit from the Congress comes at a time when the BJP is smarting under its defeat in West Bengal. Though he had lost the last three elections he contested, in 2014, 2017 and 2019, the BJP is creating a hype around his name to signal the Brahmins that the party is mindful of their concerns.

It is also sending another message and this is to potential entrants who may be looking at the party as a possible haven — that if they cross over, their interests would be taken care of. An integral part of the BJP’s poll strategy has been to wean away important leaders from other parties on the eve of elections to bolster its prospects.

This was a message of the appointment of a former Congressman Himanta Biswa Sarma as the chief minister of Assam. The elevation of Jyotiraditya Scindia as a Union Minister, which is on the cards, would do likewise. He has been waiting in the wings for the promised prize since he crossed over with 22 MLAs, bringing down the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh last year.

Finally, the PM is expected to go for the long overdue cabinet reshuffle in Delhi soon. There are many vacancies to fill after the exit of allies like the Shiv Sena, Akali Dal, and Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP.

Another poll season is not far away. Eight elections are due in 2022 — in UP, Punjab, Manipur, Goa, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Jammu and Kashmir. It goes without saying that UP will determine the BJP’s prospects in 2024. It is not in power in large states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. If you add Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Kerala to it, the loss of UP will put it out of power in states accounting for more than 250 Lok Sabha seats. The BJP cannot afford to let UP slip out of its hands.

The UP poll is likely to be a four-cornered fight. Already, Amit Shah has reached out to smaIler parties, like the Kurmi-dominated Apna Dal and the Nishad Party. The non-Yadav OBCs and the most backward castes (MBCs) have been an important catchment area for the BJP.

Mayawati is likely to go it alone. From all accounts, she may consider supporting the BJP afterwards if it falls short of the magic numbers.

The Samajwadi Party and RLD have already forged an understanding. The farmers of western UP, particularly the Jats, are looking at the new RLD chief Jayant Choudhary with favour, after his support to the Kisan agitation. Akhilesh Yadav does not seem to be in a mood to tie up with the Congress this time, as he did in 2017. The Congress brings nothing to the table except inflated demands for seats. The Muslims, Akhilesh calculates, would gravitate to his party as the main challenger of the BJP, as it happened in West Bengal, rather than getting divided.

The Bengal victory has already spurred the non-BJP regional parties into action. Having joined the BJP in 2017, Mukul Roy’s ghar wapsi in the Trinamool Congress was a big setback for the BJP. He is already in touch with 20 BJP MLAs in West Bengal with a view to bringing some over to Mamata’s side.

In Bihar, HAM party leader Jitan Ram Manjhi is in touch with the RLD leaders and spoke to Lalu Yadav in New Delhi last week.

Poll strategist Prashant Kishor, who delivered West Bengal and Tamil Nadu to the TMC and DMK and who knows many regional satraps well, had a three-hour meeting with Sharad Pawar in Mumbai to look ahead. Will he now play the role of a ‘sutradhar’ in getting together the non-BJP parties for 2024?

These are some straws in the wind. Everything will hinge on Uttar Pradesh. The outcome of UP-2022 will depend on how much ground the BJP manages to recover with the correctives it is trying to put in place. It is not going to be easy. People forget economic hardships, but it is more difficult to forgive the loss of loved ones due to the government’s ineptitude and insensitive handling. Talk to people in Baghpat or in Lucknow, there is palpable anger against the party.

The PM’s image has also taken a beating. By calling Yogi to Delhi, and pulling him up, the Prime Minister is trying to mitigate the damage, by coming across as a leader who intervenes when things go wrong. But will his word carry weight as it used to at one time?

Much will also depend on Akhilesh Yadav. In 2012, the red-capped Akhilesh had hit the road on his cycle, and taken his party to victory. The Samajwadi Party won in the recent panchayat polls by default. It will take more than ‘default’ to recapture the state in 2022.

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