A few weeks ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party possibly had multiple faces it could project as its chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh where Assembly elections are due early next year. But as its rivals upped their game, the saffron party has now found itself left without a willing “winnable face”.
The predicament – caused partly by Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s refusal to be the chief ministerial candidate, and partly due to a spurt in the mobilisation efforts by the Bahujan Samaj Party and Congress – has forced the saffron party to opt for a survey before taking a final call on the issue.
According to a senior BJP leader, the party has hired a private agency, which will collect feedback from various Assembly constituencies in August.
“Based on the feedback, the party will take a decision on who will be our CM face or whether we should approach the voters on the plank of development without projecting any name,” said the party leader.
Who wants the top job?
Of the four major parties in the politically crucial state, the BJP alone has not announced a chief ministerial candidate. The ruling Samajwadi Party has Akhilesh Yadav while the Bahujan Samaj Party has Mayawati, and two weeks ago, the Congress declared former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit as its nominee.
That the BJP is facing difficulty in finding a suitable candidate is no longer a secret.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a rally at Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh on May 26 purportedly to mark two years of his government at the Centre, it seemed as if the BJP had made up its mind to field Rajnath Singh as its chief ministerial candidate.
Though Modi did not refer to the upcoming elections, Singh used the Saharanpur rally to sound the poll bugle.
In an emotive tone, the home minister pleaded in his speech that “even Lord Ram’s vanvas had ended in 14 years”, implying that the BJP, which was voted out of the state 14 years ago, should be voted back to power in 2017.
A series of public meetings that Singh addressed in different parts of Uttar Pradesh after the Saharanpur rally further indicated that the BJP had zeroed in on him to lead the party in the poll-bound state.
However, when the time came to announce his name, Singh backed out. He made his position clear to Modi and BJP president Amit Shah in a meeting just before the party’s two-day national executive on June 12-13 at Allahabad, according to highly placed sources in the party.
In fact, on June 10, two days before the national executive, Singh even sought to scotch all rumours that he was the party’s pick for Uttar Pradesh by telling media persons that all such reports were “fictitious” and that he would extend “his full support” to whoever the party chose as its chief ministerial candidate.
Though Modi and Shah have continued to pressurise Singh, he has remained adamant on his position so far.
Other options
According to sources, Singh’s refusal, caused primarily by his reservations with regard to the electoral strategy chalked out by Shah, has left the BJP president with only two options – to go with a lightweight leader as its face or risk letting the crucial Assembly polls to be seen as a referendum on the performance of the Modi government at the Centre.
BJP leader Varun Gandhi, who was vying for the top job in the state until recently, has already sided with the Opposition parties by coming out openly against the Modi government on the child labour amendment bill passed recently in Parliament.
Participating in a debate on the bill in Lok Sabha on July 25, Gandhi voiced his strong reservations against many of its clauses, and concluded his speech by saying: “We expect a future where a child is holding a book in his hand and not an agricultural implement or a broom.”
Another chief ministerial aspirant, and a desperate one at that, is Yogi Adityanath, the mahant of the Gorakhnath temple.
However, he is seen as a regional leader having no appeal beyond Gorakhpur and the neighbouring districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Though a section of the state Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is still backing his case, the BJP seems to have made up its mind against the Thakur leader.
A Catch-22 situation
Recent developments have also given a caste angle to the BJP’s predicament especially in the aftermath of Thakur anger following the expulsion of BJP leader Dayashankar Singh, a Thakur, from the party for his remarks comparing Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati to a prostitute.
There is a strong feeling among the BJP leadership that stressing too much on Thakurs may strip the party of the support of Brahmins, who account for nearly 60% of the upper caste population in Uttar Pradesh. The threat has become tangible after the Congress projected Dikshit, a Brahmin, as its face in the state.
At a time when the BJP is finding it difficult to retain its hold over a section of Dalits, who seem to have returned to Mayawati’s fold, and when a crack has appeared in its crucial Kurmi vote after the Krishna Patel-led Apna Dal snapped ties with the saffron party, a drift of Brahmins may prove lethal for its prospects in the Assembly election.
But if the BJP decides to enter into the fray with a non-Thakur face, and if the Samajwadi Party emerges as the main rival of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the majority of Thakurs – for whom defeating Mayawati is fast becoming more important than ensuring victory for the saffron outfit – may simply opt for Akhilesh Yadav.
Yadav, who has consistently been cultivating Thakurs for a while now, might just be waiting for the right moment to send out the message that it is his party rather than the BJP that is fighting the real battle against Mayawati’s party.
It’s clear the BJP is facing a Catch-22 situation here.
