Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath is yet to recover from the upset in last year’s Lok Sabha elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s paltry tally of 33 seats out of the state’s 80 has exposed him to taunts from within the Hindutva organisation.

The latest attack comes from Nand Kishor Gurjar, the BJP MLA from Loni Assembly in Ghaziabad. On March 20, Gurjar and his workers clashed with police officials while marching in a religious procession. At a dramatic press conference after the scuffle, Gurjar showed up in a torn kurta and declared that “no other government in India had ever seen so much corruption” as Adityanath’s.

“Bureaucrats have cast a spell on Yogiji in the last two years – before that Yogiji was doing good work,” he said. “They give Yogiji an issue and make him talk about it. Then they loot the state and its people.”

The legislator added that cow slaughter, fake encounters, rapes, murder and robbery were rife in the state and alleged that there had been a police conspiracy to kill him during the scuffle.

Ninety kilometres away, another BJP leader, former Union minister Sanjeev Balyan, is publicly protesting against the arrest of local party leader Vivek Premi. For over a month, shopowners in Shamli’s Gandhi chowk have been locked in a tussle over the ownership of nine shops with a local Shiv temple run by the Nath sect – the sect to which Adityanath belongs.

Premi rallied behind the shopowners and was arrested after a police complaint by Karan Nath, the temple priest.

Unlike Gurjar, Balyan, who is a Jat, did not take aim at the government but warned the local administration that “no power on Earth will be able to make the shopowners vacate their shops”. In January, Balyan had alleged that the state government had withdrawn his security detail after he exposed police corruption.

These leaders are not the first to ruffle Adityanath’s feathers. In July, BJP leader Keshav Prasad Maurya was the first to imply that the party cadre was unhappy with the chief minister. This was followed by potshots at Adityanath by alliance partner and Nishad Party chief Sanjay Nishad in August.

Adityanath tried to flex his muscle by securing key bye-poll victories in November – some very dubious. But the sheen of that achievement has not lasted.

That is because the discontentment is driven by a deeper malaise: there is a growing feeling that Adityanath’s tenure has only empowered upper-caste Hindus, while the rest have been given measly sops and left behind. Opposition leader Akhilesh Yadav calls this group “PDA” – Picchde, Dalit, Alpsankhyak or backward, Dalit and minorities.

This feeling has not escaped the BJP cadre either, as I had reported after traveling across eastern Uttar Pradesh last year.

A post-poll survey after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections showed falling support for the BJP among Other Backward Classes and Dalits.

This is possibly why a Gurjar legislator and a Jat former union minister have spoken out against Adityanath’s police. Both hail from communities classified as OBC in the state. So do Maurya and Nishad.

A dataset leaked to journalists in September showed that police encounters during Adityanath’s tenure killed 207 persons – 67 were Muslim, 41 from the OBC castes, 38 from the upper-castes, 14 were Dalit, three from tribal communities, two were Sikh, and oddly, “42 from other castes and religions”.

Uttar Pradesh has 79 OBC castes. But 33 of the 41 OBCs killed in these encounters hail from just three of these – there were 16 Yadavs, while 17 were Gurjars and Jats.

This explains why the common theme across these little rebellions is police heavy-handedness and corruption. They are not peculiar to western Uttar Pradesh. Last year, I had reported how the BJP rank and file in the eastern part of the state was also bitter about the police being too powerful and almost unaccountable.

Going forward, this caste-based groundswell against the chief minister could take many forms. So far, the most interesting element of these attacks is that they are coming from BJP OBC leaders, such as Gurjar and Balyan, who are – and perhaps this is just a coincidence – close to Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

It is no secret that both Adityanath and Shah harbour grand political ambitions about filling the space that 74-year-old Modi will leave when he eventually vacates his position. Adityanath is at the helm of India’s most politically important state but beset by internal fissures. Shah commands the Bharatiya Janata Party and is the Union home minister.

This rivalry within the world’s biggest political party promises to yield a lot of intrigue, at least till early 2027, when Uttar Pradesh goes to polls.

Here is a summary of last week’s top stories.

No room for comedy? Stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra has got interim anticipatory bail till April 7 from the Madras High Court in a case filed against him in Mumbai. The case is about satirical remarks that he ostensibly made about Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

The judge said he was satisfied at a preliminary level that Kamra would not be able to approach courts in Maharashtra for anticipatory bail.

Kamra said in his petition the Madras High Court had the jurisdiction to hear his anticipatory bail petition as he is a permanent resident of Tamil Nadu.

The case against the comedian in Mumbai was filed after he uploaded a video of a performance during which he alluded to Shinde as a “traitor”, pointing to the politician’s 2022 rebellion against Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray, fracturing the party and toppling the Maharashtra government. Kamra, however, did not refer to Shinde by name.

Judge under scanner. Justice Yashwant Varma of the Delhi High Court has been transferred to the Allahabad High Court, his parent High Court, amid allegations that unaccounted cash was found at his home. The Supreme Court had recommended the transfer earlier this week, but had emphasised that the action was unrelated to the inquiry into cash having been discovered on his premises.

The transfer order came despite opposition from six High Court bar associations, the representatives of which met Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna on Thursday to urge him to revoke the transfer.

The cash was allegedly recovered when emergency services responded to a fire at Varma’s home on March 14. The judge said he was in Bhopal at the time and claimed that the money did not belong to him or his family.

Vineet Bhalla explains why Indian judges enjoy de facto impunity when it comes to corruption allegations.

Sanctions against RAW? A United States panel on religious freedom recommended sanctions against India’s foreign intelligence agency for its alleged involvement in plots to assassinate pro-Khalistan separatists. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reiterated its suggestion that India be designated a “country of particular concern” for alleged “egregious religious freedom violations”.

This is the sixth time that the panel has made this recommendation, which Washington has so far not accepted.

The panel urged the US government to impose targeted sanctions on individuals such as Vikash Yadav, a former Research and Analysis Wing officer accused in the US of murder-for-hire.

India’s external affairs ministry on Wednesday alleged that the commission was continuing with its “pattern of issuing biased and politically motivated assessments”. It added that efforts to undermine India’s standing “as a beacon of democracy and tolerance” will not succeed.

Also on Scroll last week

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