Has the Cabinet reshuffle weakened the BJP among UP’s Kurmis?

In November 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first Cabinet reshuffle outraged most of his party's Yadav leaders in Bihar. This section of the Other Backward Classes had helped the Bharatiya Janata Party win 31 of Bihar’s 40 seats in the Lok Sabha elections held earlier that year.

So the Yadav leaders were upset when Modi bypassed the BJP’s homegrown Yadav leaders in Bihar and had inducted Ram Kripal Yadav, who had joined the party only around the beginning of that year, into his council of ministers.

The slight was felt so keenly that it was one of the factors for the drift of Yadavs back to the Rashtriya Janata Dal by the time of the Assembly polls in Bihar in September-October 2015.

Kurmis out in the cold?

Eighteen months later, after the second reshuffle of Modi’s Cabinet, affected just before the build-up to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections next year, the BJP seems to have gotten itself into a similar fix.

This time, the disquiet is among the party’s Kurmi leaders who are watching, with great anxiety, the rise of Apna Dal leader Anupriya Patel as the ruling dispensation’s Kurmi mascot in Uttar Pradesh.

What has made the disquiet rather intense is the fact that this has happened at a time when the party’s own Kurmi face in the poll-bound state – Minister of State Santosh Gangwar – was demoted rather unceremoniously in Tuesday’s Cabinet reshuffle when he lost independent charge of the Ministry of Textiles.

The BJP already has veteran Vinay Katiyar, the fire-brand Kurmi leader, sulking on the margins ever since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Once a prominent leader of the party, these days he is simply waiting to be utilised by the leadership.

Mother-daughter feud

The contrasting fortunes of Anupriya Patel and the BJP’s own Kurmi leaders are by no means the only issues the party may have to deal with in order to retain its control over this powerful section of the Other Backward Classes in Uttar Pradesh.

The BJP will also have to take into account the renewed feud between Patel and her mother – the Apna Dal chief Krishna Patel – that the reshuffle has brought about.

Angered over the unilateral manner Anupriya Patel was handpicked by Modi for his Cabinet, Krishna Patel, who is the signatory to the Apna Dal-BJP alliance forged before the 2014 elections, declared on Tuesday that her party had decided to walk out of the National Democratic Alliance.

The Apna Dal was founded by Krishna Patel’s husband Sone Lal Patel and is considered the Kurmi party of Uttar Pradesh. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the party won two seats. While one MP, Anupriya Patel, has sided with the BJP, the other Apna Dal MP has stayed with Krishna Patel.

Like the Yadavs of Bihar, Kurmis had played a critical role in ensuring the BJP’s sweep in the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh when the BJP won 71 out of 80 seats.

Kurmis are numerically second only to Yadavs in this politically-important state and are considered one of the most significant caste groups in the BJP’s electoral strategy to consolidate non-Yadav Other Backward Classes in Uttar Pradesh.

Kurmi clout

Though Kurmis are present in almost all 403 Assembly segments in the state, they are numerically significant as voters in its central and eastern parts. In districts like Mirzapur, Sant Kabir Nagar, Sonbhadra, Bareily, Jalaun, Varanasi, Fatehpur, Unnao, Pratapgarh, Kaushambi, Allahabad, Sitapur, Barabanki, Bahraich, Srawasti, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar and Basti, Kurmi voters account for 6%-11% of the total population.

In the Lok Sabha elections, Kurmis are said to have voted en bloc for the BJP-led alliance. But ahead of the Assembly polls, a scramble for Kurmi votes has already started in Uttar Pradesh.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the state’s Kurmi face, has been addressing rallies relentlessly in various districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh. The ruling Samajwadi Party, too, has been trying hard to lure away this section of the Other Backward Classes through the party’s Kurmi leaders like Beni Prasad Verma, who was recently sent to the Rajya Sabha, and state Public Works Department Minister Surendra Patel.

BJP insiders fear that the breach in the party’s Kurmi front may further intensify the scramble for this section of the Other Backward Classes in Uttar Pradesh.