Amid signs of dissent in Uttar Pradesh following the party’s poor show in the Lok Sabha elections, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has assumed direct control of preparations for 10 Assembly bypolls that will be held in the state after their MLAs were elected to Parliament.
While the election dates have not been announced yet and the organisation has yet to prepare a plan for these 10 seats, the CM has set the ball rolling by delegating responsibilities to ministers, who have been instructed to camp in the Assembly constituency assigned to them, resolve people’s grievances, and strengthen booth management.
At the meeting held at the CM residence in Lucknow on Wednesday, the two people conspicuous by their absence were Deputy CMs Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak. Not just them, sources said senior BJP organisational leaders were also absent. Explaining this, some BJP leaders said that till the election dates were announced it was “mainly the work of the government to resolve people’s issues” and that is why only ministers were present at the meeting.
“The government is doing its job. Once the bypoll dates are announced, the sangathan (party organisation) will decide who will do what,” said a senior BJP leader, emphasising the most important job at present is to “resolve people’s grievances” to counter negative publicity through proactive intervention.
Adityanath’s meeting with the ministers came on a day when Maurya reiterated his statement that the party was bigger than the government. He had made similar comments — seen as a veiled attack on the CM, suggesting that he was ignoring party workers and running the state through the bureaucracy — at a recent state party meeting.
Sources said that with the BJP losing the prestige battle of Faizabad to the Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Awadhesh Prasad in the Lok Sabha polls, at the meeting special emphasis was laid on Prasad’s former Assembly constituency Milkipur. According to SP insiders, the party is considering fielding the MP’s son Ajit from the constituency. BJP sources said that winning the constituency would help, to some degree, mitigate the damage caused by the loss of Faizabad, of which Ayodhya is a part. Adityanath has given the responsibility of this seat to Agriculture Minister Surya Pratap Shahi and Mayankeshwar Sharan Singh who holds, among others, the Minister of State (MoS) for Health portfolio.
Government insiders said the CM had also delegated responsibilities to the BJP’s alliance partners NISHAD Party and Apna Dal (Soneylal). Earlier this week, NISHAD Party chief and state minister Sanjay Nishad raised the issue of “misuse of bulldozer against the poor”. The statement came on Monday when Nishad also met Maurya and supported the Deputy CM’s statement about the party organisation being bigger than the government.
Apna Dal (S) leader Anupriya Patel’s husband Ashish Singh Patel who is a minister in the Adityanath government was also present at the meeting. Anupriya, who is a Union MoS, wrote a letter to the CM earlier this month alleging that reserved seats meant for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) had become “unreserved” during the government’s recruitment process, illustrating a concern about a sizable chunk of SC and OBC votes in UP shifting to the Opposition in the parliamentary elections.
Of the 10 Assembly seats where bypolls have to be held, five are currently held by the SP, three are with the BJP, and one each is with the NISHAD Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), another BJP ally. While the SP won Sisamau, Katehri, Kundarki, Milkipur, and Karhal in the 2022 Assembly polls, the BJP at present holds Khair, Phulpur, and Ghaziabad. The NISHAD Party won Manjhwah but its MLA was elected to Parliament on a BJP ticket and now it will look to retain the seat. The Jayant Chaudhary-led RLD won the Meerapur seat in Muzaffarnagar in 2022.
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