The BJP’s poor show in Uttar Pradesh in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections — in which the party won 36 seats compared to Opposition’s 43 — seems to have set off turbulence in the state unit.
Changes are expected both in the BJP organisation and the state cabinet in Uttar Pradesh — the BJP could get a new state chief as Bhupendra Chaudhary has offered to resign after meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President JP Nadda. Cabinet reshuffle is also expected in the state. The only Cabinet expansion in Yogi 2.0 was earlier this year when four ministers were added as RLD, SBSP became part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). More backward faces, faces from areas where BJP faced losses in 2024 could also find representation.
With buzz of discord between chief minister Yogi Adityanath and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya, the central BJP has asked state leaders to stop public sparring and focus on the upcoming 10 bypolls. The chief minister met ministers on Wednesday over 10 upcoming by-elections but both the deputy chief ministers — Maurya and Brijesh Pathak — were missing from the meeting.
Rumours of sparring between the leaders began in political circles when Maurya skipped multiple cabinet meetings chaired by Adityanath in the last one month.
The deputy CM added fuel to fire when he said at a BJP meeting in Lucknow — where Yogi Adityanath, Pathak and around 3,500 delegates were present — that “no government is bigger than the organisation (sangathan)”. “No one is bigger than the ‘sangathan’. We are proud of our workers,” he said.
The statement reflected how a section of BJP leaders felt bureaucracy in UP was outweighing the BJP organisation. This was flagged as one reason why BJP workers did not aggressively work in the recent elections in Uttar Pradesh.
NDA ally Sanjay Nishad has backed Maurya’s statement, saying many officers are aligned with the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, which led to the BJP’s poor show in the state.
In a damage-control exercise, Maurya met BJP chief JP Nadda on Tuesday. BJP’s strategy in the upcoming by-elections and the party’s poor performance in the recent Lok Sabha polls were the agenda for the second meeting between the leaders in the last 48 hours. Earlier, the deputy CM met Nadda on July 14 when the latter presided over the state executive meeting in Lucknow.
Taking pot-shots at the BJP, Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday said: “In the heat of BJP’s fight for power, governance and administration in UP has been put on the back burner…BJP is sinking in the quagmire of internal conflicts.”
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