High profile exodus: Ominous signs for BJP in poll-bound UP

The tide is slowly but steadily turning in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh where the ruling BJP is fighting to retain its ministers and MLAs many of whom have quit claiming they felt neglected by the party they had stood by and fought for in recent years. This is enough indication that the radical Hindutva card and the targeting of minorities in which the saffronists excel, have not found favour with these leaders who assert that factors like the caste census, jobs, reservation and price rise matter much more to the electorate. Though early pre-poll surveys had pointed to a slight edge for the ruling party over the Samajwadi party in the Feb-March polls, the coming days could witness a paradigm shift and even upset the calculations of the BJP top brass. Nalin Verma analyses the sudden exodus from the BJP.

When India’s two batsmen—Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane— got out cheaply in quick succession during the first innings of the second test match against South Africa on January 3, the middle order of the mighty Team India crumbled. Pujara and Rahane made up for their failure at the second innings by scoring fluent half centuries but India eventually lost the match.

The BJP’s high profile OBC leader and labour minister in the Adityanath Yogi government, Swami Prasad Maurya resigned on Tuesday to join the Samajvadi Party—the saffron party’s main rival—on the Uttar Pradesh’s turf. In quick succession, the BJP’s three more “wickets” fell; three more MLAs—Brajesh Prajapati, Roshanlal Varma and Bhagwati Prajapati Sagar, all belonging to the different backward castes— too followed Maurya’s footsteps. Adityanath suffered yet another setback on Wednesday with another of his ministers, Dara Singh Chouhan quitting his council of ministers to join the S.P.

Cricket and politics are different ballgames and it’s frivolous to drawl a parallel between the two but given the nature and volume of the exodus of the OBC leaders who constitute over 36 percent of the Uttar Pradesh’s electorate and who played a crucial role in the BJP’s victory from 2014 onwards it will be hardly surprising if the BJP meets the fate on March 10—the day of assembly poll results-- what Team India met on January 6 at Johannesburg. It’s naive to think that the BJP—by all accounts the most resourceful party—will not make amend for these heavy losses to the rival party. Soon after quitting the BJP, Swami Prasad Maurya was booked under the clauses of “hate speech” in 2014. It is the way of the BJP—which has turned blind eye to the genocide call given by the hate-mongers at Haridwar Dharam Sansad recently— to make amends against the renegades.

But undeterred, Swami Prasad, a six term MLA, said, “At least 10 to 12 more OBC MLAs will leave the BJP to join the Samajvadi Party. The BJP has humiliated the dalits, backwards, farmers, unemployed and small traders’’. The Samajvadi Party’s non-Yadav OBC stock has exponentially swelled with the joining of Rakesh Rathore, Madhuri Varma, Shivshankar Singh Patel, Lalji Verma—all lower OBC leaders from the BJP and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the recent past. About a month ago, a powerful lower OBC leader from the BJP, Omprakash Rajbhar joined Akhilesh Yadav’s bandwagon.

Lucknow’s air is thick with the speculation that another minister, Dharam Singh Saini-- belonging to the lower OBCs— will switch over to the Samajvadi Party sooner than expected. The only OBC leader of mettle now left with the BJP is the deputy chief minister, Keshav Prasad Maurya. But Keshaw has always sulked for the saffron party making him one of the two deputy CMs despite he spearheaded the BJP’s access and acceptability among the non-Yadav OBC castes after he joined it in 2016 and also led the BJP’s campaign in 2017 elections. When the BJP won the 2017 Assembly elections decisively the party made Adityanath Yogi—an upper caste Thakur—the chief minister. Akhilesh Yadav’s Social Engineering: Akhilesh Yadav who lost to the BJP in 2017 is on the spree to expand beyond his traditional Yadav-Muslim base. He is poaching non-Yadav OBC leaders particularly from the BJP with felicity in the run up to the assembly elections commencing from February 10. He is well ahead of the BJP in roping in the smaller parties with effective clout in their respective areas. For instance, he has struck an alliance with the Rastriya Lok Dal of Jayant Choudhary—grandson of former prime minister late Choudhary Charan Singh and son of late union minister Ajit Singh. The RLD by far enjoys strong clout with the jats of Baghpat-Muzaffarnagar region of western Uttar Pradesh. The Muslims who constitute about 30 to 35 percent of the population in the western Uttar Pradesh are lar