Battle for Uttar Pradesh: BJP gets ready to contest the existential assembly poll

T he normally tight-lipped DI (Director of Information) in the Uttar Pradesh Government, Shishir Singh, was at his loquacious best this week, say journalists in Lucknow. He kept up a running commentary through the afternoon on when the chief minister Yogi Adityanath left the state capital, when he landed at the Hindon airfield, how many vehicles were there in his motorcade and of course when he would be meeting Home Minister Amit Shah and the Prime Minister.

Many believe the strategy was to keep the media focus on Yogi and divert attention from other simmering issues and the opposition.

Earlier Maharaj Ji, as Yogi likes to be called, would fly to Delhi quietly and return without anyone getting a whiff of it. But over the last fortnight suspense was deliberately built up over the alleged rift between the Prime Minister and the Maharaj of Uttar Pradesh. The PM did not greet the CM on his birthday became newspaper headlines, prompting an intrepid observer to quip, “Who knows that the PM didn’t call him up to wish?”

2017 Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly election

Media in Uttar Pradesh have been content to jump the gun and speculate over rifts within the BJP, alleged resentment simmering against the Yogi, the impending replacement of the chief minister and so on. It suited the CM and the BJP as Uttar Pradesh, which like Bihar breathes and survives on politics not air, breathlessly consumed the gossip doled out. Very few bothered to ask what BJP would gain by changing Yogi barely seven months before the election. His control over the bureaucracy is total and while the same cannot be said about the party organisation (Yogi is not from the RSS), it would be the least of his worries.

BJP ministers and MLAs in the state, partly worried about their own political future and uncertainty whether they would again get the party ticket to contest and worried partly because of the anger and discontent among the people, have been vocal. But the Yogi, during the second Covid wave, undertook tours to districts when other BJP ministers were nowhere to be seen. And while dead bodies floating in the rivers dented his own image, he turned the table by aggressively going after a few reports, videos and posts which turned out to be dated or photoshopped.

That BJP fixes the narrative in the media is no secret. Nor is it a secret that the BJP acts ruthlessly in dealing with ‘mistakes’ in the media. Several illustrious media outlets in recent weeks were reminded of this when it was quietly pointed out to them that they had published and posted ‘old’ photographs of dead bodies buried on river banks and people allegedly stealing the shrouds. Within days the reports on dead bodies floating in the river disappeared from the headlines and the media clamped up. The ‘mistake’ will now hang over them like the sword of Damocles and force them to behave.

The bottomline is that the Bharatiya Janata Party cannot afford to lose Uttar Pradesh and it will do everything to retain it in the assembly election early next year, due before March.

The appointment of former Chief Secretary Anup Chandra Pandey as one of the Election Commissioners, the induction of Jitin Prasada from the Congress into the BJP and induction of former Gujarat cadre IAS Arvind Sharma as a member of the Legislative Council are part of the effort to prepare for the battle for Uttar Pradesh. All three are low-profile and ‘loyal’ and are of course Brahmins. Low profile, loyal and honest bureaucrats are preferred by the PMO because they are not trouble makers or ambitious and are generally meek, explains a BJP insider.

Overtures have already been made to the farmers and more placatory gestures, if not measures, are expected from the Government. In 2017 Narendra Modi electrified the state by a single speech when he divisively and derisively compared shamshans (crematoriums) with qabristans (graveyards). No observer in Uttar Pradesh underestimates his ability to introduce a similar narrative in Varanasi or Mathura before March.

What next? Observers believe that a cabinet reshuffle is on the cards in the state as well as in New Delhi. Caste representations will be set right, they say. Yogi Adityanath, they claim, has no understanding of the importance of smaller castes in the state and has no interest in placating Prajapatis, Nishads or Vishwakarmas. But both RSS and the BJP have been perfecting their caste engineering in the state over the years and sops are expected to be handed out in the next few weeks.

That RSS and the BJP are serious and determined to retain Uttar Pradesh shows. The flying visit to Lucknow by Dattatreya Hosabale, the second man in command in the RSS and PM Modi’s confidante, was followed by a longer visit by the BJP Organising Secretary B.L. Santhosh, who individually met the ministers in the state, which observers believe was unusual if not unprecedented. This was quickly followed by a RSS huddle in Delhi which was joined by the PM. The plan clearly is not just retaining UP but retaining the brute majority in the assembly.

Such a comprehensive victory in Uttar Pradesh in 2022 is expected to overshadow the dismal mismanagement and misgovernance over the past few years and pave the ground for the general election in 2024.

While Jitin Prasada is a political lightweight in the state, observers say that his stature will be determined by BJP’s willingness to project him. Prasada, for example, has been vocal about the incarceration of women from Bikru village in Kanpur, the native village of slain gangster Vikas Dubey. The gangster, who was wanted for gunning down eight policemen and was on the run, died in a mysterious encounter killing when he was being driven back from Madhya Pradesh.

A section of Brahmin leaders even within the BJP have been critical of the continued incarceration of the women. “One of the women Khushi Dubey was married to Amar just three days before he was gunned down,” pointed out Umesh Dwivedi, a BJP MLC, in a letter to the chief minister, demanding release of these women.

They were echoing the demand voiced by AAP’s Sanjay Singh, who said, “Police should release the four innocent women and a two-and-a-halfyear-old child,” and alleged that gangster Amar Dubey’s wife, her mother, another slain gangster Heeru Dubey’s mother, her house help and her twoand-a-half-year-old son were in jail since July 2020. Bikru incident. This politics of vengeance must stop, he had demanded.

Appointment of Sanjay Srinet as Chairman of Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission intensified the ‘save Brahmin’ campaign in the political sphere to corner BJP and the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Srinet is a Thakur by caste.