- Sunday, February 23, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come up with flying colours every time the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has gone to polls since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. In the 2017 state and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP benefited in India’s most crucial political state by joining hands with smaller parties having a base among different castes. UP is set for its next Assembly election in early 2022 and the BJP faces the challenge of repeating its past results there before Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks his third mandate in 2024.
Months before the important polls, the saffron party has focused on stitching up a strong social alliance. Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who is No.2 in the BJP after Modi, has already reached out to parties like Apna Dal(Sonelal) and Nishad Party. Recently, Indian National Congress leader and a former central minister Jitin Prasada also joined the saffron party. These suggest that the saffron party, which had swept the 2017 polls, is taking measures to get the poll arithmetic right.
BJP wooing Apnal Dal(S), Nishad Party?
Prasada’s joining the BJP is significant since he hails from a noted Brahmin family and the BJP believes that the young leader’s defection from the Congress will help in containing any dissatisfaction that the Brahmins might have with the government of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a Thakur. Meanwhile, though Anupriya Das of Apna Dal(S) has not spoken about her meeting with Shah, Sanjay Nishad of the Nishad Party has made it clear that his party wants a representation in the state government to fulfil aspirations of the marginalised communities that support it. Nishad even told PTI that political power is stronger than God’s power to emphasise the importance of addressing several challenges that those communities face. He also reiterated his demand to give the ‘nishad’ or boatman community, which comes under various castes and subcastes, benefits under the Scheduled Castes and not under the category of the Other Backward Communities as being given in UP at the moment.
In a message to the BJP, the Nishad Party leader said the community has in the past supported parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and Congress but stopped voting for them after they did not address the community’s concerns. “We understand the Modi government has been busy with important national issues,” he said, referring to Article 370 revocation. “Now we believe our concerns will be addressed,” he said.
Nishad’s son Praveen Kumar Nishad had won as an SP candidate from Gorakhpur, which is the seat of CM Adityanath, in the 2018 Lok Sabha by-poll, shocking the BJP. The saffron party then worked to woo him to join him during the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
Anupriya Patel, the leader of Kurmi voted-based Apna Dal(S), served as a minister in the first Narendra Modi government but relations between the party and BJP deteriorated later with the regional party accusing the bigger partner of not giving its members due attention. Apna Dal’s reported talks with the Congress during the 2019 Lok Sabha election even as it finally contested as a BJP ally kept Patel out of the reckoning.
BJP also eyeing to bring back SBSP?
Besides the Kurmi and Nishad communities, the BJP is also reportedly looking to bring back into its fold former ally Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) though its leader Om Prakash Rajbhar has rubbished such a possibility. The Rajbhar community-based party contested the 2017 UP elections in alliance with the BJP and Rajbhar served as a minister in the Yogi government for two years.
Sources in the BJP said the lotus party has always worked to give due representation to various communities and that it was never hesitant from tying up with smaller parties. “We have done it in various states, be it Bihar, Assam or Uttar Pradesh,” a leader said.
SP leader Akhilesh Yadav, who served as the chief minister of UP between 2012 and 2017, has also been working to broaden the party’s social appeal by including leaders from outside its core constituency.
The Adityanath government has come under the scanner over its tackling of the Covid-19 crisis and even state BJP leaders have expressed concerns. There has been a strong speculation that Adityanath, who recently met Modi and Shah in New Delhi, may go for an expansion of his Cabinet and Shah’s meetings with leaders of smaller parties are being seen as part of that exercise.
The BJP won 312 seats out of 403 in the 2017 UP elections while the SP finished a distant second with 47. The BSP got 19 while the Apna Dal(s) fared better than the Congress by winning nine seats to the latter’s seven.
