BJP fortifies east Uttar Pradesh, faces challenges on western front on road to 2024 Lok Sabha polls

In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, despite a series of failed attempts, Union home minister Amit Shah made one last bid to woo the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s English speaking OBC chief Jayant Chaudhary, a Jat leader.

This attempt, too, was not fruitful. But the feelers to Jayant kept being sent till just about two weeks before the first round of polls started from west U.P’s Jat belt on February 10. The move showed the BJP’s anxiousness to woo a party that has resisted its overtures and stood firmly behind the state’s main opposition Samajwadi Party over the last few elections.

Now, in view of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, all eyes are on Jayant again as the BJP continues to woo him and his party’s Jat vote.

“It’s true that the BJP is anxious to get the RLD on board because unlike in east U.P, the party isn’t finding enough partners (in west UP),” said Sudhir Panwar, a former member of the planning commission who had contested the Thana Bhawan assembly seat in Shamli district against BJP leader Suresh Rana in the 2017 U.P. polls and lost. In 2022, Rana, the then sugarcane development minister, was among the 11 BJP ministers who lost the polls.

Panwar was referring to the fact that the challenges in western Uttar Pradesh, which has a sizeable Muslim population, are unlike those in east U.P, where the BJP’s campaign has been boosted by the homecoming of OBC leaders like Dara Singh Chauhan, its former OBC wing chief who had quit the Yogi Adityanath government, along with two other OBC ministers Swami Prasad Maurya and Dharam Singh Saini to join hands with the Samajwadi Party, just ahead of the 2022 U.P. assembly polls.

Dara Singh Chauhan, along with Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) Om Prakash Rajbhar, who too was with the SP in the 2022 polls, had caused the defeat of the BJP in assembly constituencies like Ghosi, dominated by Muslims and OBCs. Now, with the SBSP, too, back with the BJP-led-NDA, the BJP is fancying its chances in the September 5 Ghosi by-poll, being considered by many as the first test of opposition alliance vs BJP-led NDA and in which Chauhan is back in the contest, this time as a BJP candidate. The OBC consolidation in favour of the SP in 2022 cost the BJP in constituencies like Mau, Jaunpur and Azamgarh, where it won all the 10 assembly seats.

Now, Chauhan is back with the BJP and Rajbhar returned to the NDA fold. The BJP already has the support of Nishad party that claims the support of OBC riverine community of fishermen and boatmen and Apna Dal (S) that claims the support of Kurmis, an OBC subcaste second only to Yadavs in numerical spread.

Through this caste matrix, the BJP feels it has fortified the eastern part of the state, substantially.

“Along with these leaders, two of the BJP’s biggest leaders -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi nationally and chief minister Yogi Adityanath in U.P. -- represent two ends of east U.P, Varanasi and Gorakhpur,” said professor Manuka Khanna of the Lucknow University’s political science department.

That’s why perhaps, BJP’s concerns are more about west U.P. now.

Despite sweeping the 2022 U.P. polls on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma and chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s face, becoming the first party in decades to win successive elections in the state, the BJP strategists noticed the strains in the western region where the SP-RLD alliance had made a big impression in the Jat belt. The alliance won 17 of the 27 seats in Moradabad division against the BJP’s 10 and nine out of 16 seats in Saharanpur region.

If the latest developments are factored in, it now seems certain that fresh buzz centered around BSP chief Mayawati joining the opposition alliance hasn’t materialised.

The buzz of Mayawati edging close to the Congress-led opposition alliance had gained ground as former BSP leader- turned-Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Brijlal Khabri was removed from the post, along with Naseemuddin Siddiqui, once Maya’s trusted aide before he quit after a bitter separation.

Mayawati’s sacking of Imran Masood, a controversial but influential Muslim leader in Saharanpur who now appears set to join the Congress and has declared the intent of contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha polls while attacking the BSP, further indicate that possibilities of her climbing the opposition bandwagon were remote.

“Mayawati’s non-aligned status would help the NDA,” said former U.P. minister Om Prakash Rajbhar who, after a brief fling with the Samajwadi Party, has rejoined the BJP-led-NDA in UP.

Imran Masood was among the leaders for whom Amit Shah had coined the NIZAM jibe during the 2022 UP polls.

“Nizam is an Urdu word meaning rule. But here in U.P. NIZAM previously meant Naseemuddin Siddiqui, Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mukhtar Ansari,” Shah said in his west U.P. rallies to run down the opposition leaders.

Jayant is also said to be close to Azad Samaj Party (Kanshiram) chief Chandra Shekhar Azad, a young Dalit leader from the same Jatav subcaste as Mayawati. He is from Saharanpur and is also being wooed by BJP. Azad had campaigned for the SP-RLD alliance candidates in west UP in the 2022 U.P. polls.

Of the 16 Lok Sabha seats that the BJP lost in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in U.P, seven were in west U.P, including Saharanpur that was bagged by the BSP, which had then contested the elections in alliance with the Samajwadi Party. The BJP’s performance in Moradabad division was below par. The trend continued in the 2022 U.P. assembly polls. This prompted the BJP to try out an interesting political experiment months after the assembly polls. In August 2022, the BJP first named the RSS’s Dharampal Singh, as its state general secretary (organisation). Dharampal is an OBC leader from Bijnor in west U.P. Days later, it named its key organisational hand Bhupendra Chaudhary, the panchayati raj minister in Yogi Adityanath’s first government (2017-2022) hailing from Moradabad in west U.P, as its first Jat chief in Uttar Pradesh. In doing so, it did away with a decade-old practice of going into a Lok Sabha poll with a Brahmin chief in the most populous state (2009, 2014, 2019), which holds key to the party’s bid for a third consecutive stint at the Centre.

“It is just coincidental that both are OBCs because state general secretary (organisation) is from the RSS, which doesn’t prefer caste profiling. Yes, two top leaders of the state organisation coming from western U.P. do indicate the party’s focus on that region because, in politics, decisions are made after considering all factors,” a BJP leader explained.

The BJP’s Pilibhit MP Varun Gandhi’s recent remarks have been variously interpreted – with some linking them to his growing disenchantment with the party.

Will he contest on the BJP ticket this time? “Let us wait and watch. The party leadership will take a call on who contests and from where,” a senior BJP leader said. Before Varun, the Pilibhit seat had been won by his mother Maneka Gandhi, currently the BJP’s Lok Sabha MP from Sultanpur.

About 250 kilometres from Pilibhit is Firozabad, a Lok Sabha seat from where Shivpal Yadav had contested the 2019 polls on his Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party-Lohia (PSP-L) ticket. Though Shivpal lost the election, he cut into the votes of his ‘nephew’ Akshaya Yadav, son of SP veteran Ram Gopal Yadav, as a bitter family fed played out in the Samajwadi Party. However, now back with the SP, Shivpal has already declared that Akshaya would be SP candidate on the Firozabad seat to make it evident that the main opposition party in UP was putting its house in order.

Shivpal said so in as many words on X, formerly twitter: “This time Chacha will ensure Akshaya’s victory in Firozabad.”

U.P. BJP chief Bhupendra Chaudhary, however, said, “Nothing will stand in the face of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma and the performance of the double engine BJP government. In Yogi Adityanath, we have a leader who works tirelessly for the state.” He also said: “Closer to the polls, the opposition alliance will crumble under the weight of its own inner contradictions. Everybody is a PM claimant there. They only have ambitions, sans vision.”

Samajwadi Party’s veteran MP from Sambhal Shafiq Ur Rehman Barq said, “For unity, it is important that the opposition alliance shouldn’t declare its face as of now.”