Rift in UP BJP

ALL is not well with the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, which is rightly regarded as the all-important state in political and electoral terms. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath caused a flutter during the state party unit’s working committee meeting on Sunday when he said that ‘shifting of votes and overconfidence’ had hurt the BJP’s prospects in UP in the recent Lok Sabha elections. The fissures were plainly visible when Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya said at the meeting that the party organisation was always bigger than the government. Adding to the intra-party intrigue, Maurya met BJP president JP Nadda in New Delhi on Tuesday. Another key stakeholder is state party chief Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary, who has held separate meetings with Nadda and Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week.

The primary reason why the saffron party fell short of a majority in the Lok Sabha this time was its below-par performance in UP. It won just 33 seats (down from 62 in 2019) as the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance surged ahead with 43 seats in the state that sends 80 members to the Lower House. A big shocker for the BJP was its defeat from Faizabad parliamentary constituency in Ayodhya district, where PM Modi had inaugurated the Ram Mandir in January. The PM himself won the Varanasi seat by around 1.52 lakh votes, nowhere near his victory margin of 4.79 lakh votes in the 2019 polls.

With 10 Assembly seats in the state set to witness byelections in the coming months, the party high command is struggling to bring Yogi, Maurya and Chaudhary on the same page. Once seen as an understudy to PM Modi, Yogi now finds his stature diminished due to the recent electoral setback. Considering the spirited resurgence of the SP-Congress combine, the BJP will only cede more ground if it doesn’t put its UP house in order on priority.