The BJP faces many hurdles in Uttar Pradesh polls

Keshav Prasad Maurya, the BJP’s president for Uttar Pradesh, sold tea and newspapers as a child along with his father in village Sirathu close to Allahabad, has been closely associated with the RSS and belongs to a backward caste — just like Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He hopes the triumvirate of likenesses will help him breast the tape against all the other contenders swarming for the top job if and when the BJP returns to power after a 15-year-long exile in the state.

As the polls inch closer, the number of chief ministerial aspirants is growing so rapidly that the top trio of Modi, party president Amit Shah and Om Mathur, UP-in-charge and Modi’s fast friend, are having a tough time simply trying to control their overweening ambitions.

There’s Manoj Sinha, minister of state for communications & railways, MP from Ghazipur and the man in charge of making Varanasi a model city. There’s Mahesh Sharma, minister for culture and MP from Gautam Budhnagar, close to the RSS. There’s Dinesh Sharma, the mayor of Lucknow.

There’s Yogi Adityanath, five-time MP from Gorakhpur, who played a major role in securing the so-called Hindu vote cutting across caste and class in the Poorvanchal for Modi in the 2014 election.

There’s Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who abandoned the Congress because fellow politician Pramod Tiwari — the man with a penchant for white shoes — wouldn’t allow her the time of day. There’s Kalraj Mishra, the BJP’s Brahmin face and minister for micro, small and medium enterprises in Modi’s cabinet, and fearful of being superannuated any day by his PM.

There’s Uma Bharti, the firebrand yogini who made a name for herself in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, whose Lodh caste is said to back her aspirations. There’s Shrikant Sharma, the BJP’s media-in-charge, close to Shah and said to be the dark horse in the fray.

And then there is home minister Rajnath Singh, the BJP’s last CM in UP from 2000-2002. Except that the beauty of this particular election is that even the Modi-Shah-Mathur troika know that they can’t — at least, not yet — afford to push Rajnath Singh from Delhi into Lucknow, because he is the only politician within miles of Modi who has his own power base.

And so the BJP is marching to the all-important polls in UP without a chief ministerial face. Problem is, that is the least of its problems right now.

Stress factor
Less than two weeks before the first phase polls, in the western part of the state closest to Delhi, UP is up for grabs. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, even until a month ago.

The rumbling that something is seriously wrong in the villages where UP still lives and that it is a consequence of Modi’s hurriedly decided demonetisation drive. This rumbling is not a growl yet, certainly not a cacophony. But “grameen sankat”, or rural distress, could be the new buzzword in the coming weeks.

It seems the rabi crop has been late in planting. Perhaps because farmers weren’t able to get their seeds on time from agricultural cooperatives or loans from banks and had to rely on moneylenders, and are now deeply fearful that when the time comes to harvest the crop their worst fears will come true.

The second reason for the stress accumulating in top BJP circles was the real-life Mahabharata that played out on every TV screen near you, between Akhilesh Yadav and his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Here, a young and unworldly CM who wants progress and development for his people was seen battling his own father in a political ‘akhara’, who had turned against his own blood on the advice of a Shakuni-like figure, who has since decamped to London.

For the first time since Modi’s PMO undertook a survey of UP even as late as mid-December and came up with 300-odd seats for the BJP, it seems that some senior leaders aren’t so sure.

Read more about the elections:
Triangular contests to make Assembly Elections 2017 a close call
Uttar Pradesh goes for a triangular contest with BSP, BJP and SP

After all, in a state where mythology trumps education any day of the week — the latest Annual Survey of Education Report released earlier this week says that 111 million children in UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh can hardly read or write — why wouldn’t a reallife drama, full of sound and fury signifying something far more interesting than the usual contortions around caste that politicians go through every five years?

The fact is that the political upset in the Samajwadi Party (SP) in favour of Akhilesh Yadav has given him a real boost. UP’s Muslim community, around 18%, always doesn’t vote en bloc, and could be divided between Mayawati’s BSP and Akhilesh.

But if the SP-Congress combine is able to pull off its pro-minority vote-getting credentials and the SP is able to retain its Yadav bank especially in the central region, then the BJP knows it will be to its cost.

That’s why Yogi Adityanath can sulk that he is not being made the CM face — the BJP believes his motor-mouth will antagonise everyone else. Or Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who is a Jane-come-lately to the party. Or Keshav Prasad Maurya, whose name-recognition outside the Allahabad-Varanasi belt is low.

Or Uma Bharati, who really is from Madhya Pradesh and in any case, “notebandi” seems to have trumped Ram Janmabhoomi. Kalraj Mishra? Too old. Mahesh Sharma? Maybe. Dinesh Sharma? Hardly. Even Shrikant Sharma is only a dark horse.

Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: Until the battle is won, the BJP will not trust anyone with the job.

(The author is a freelance journalist)