Was This Why BJP Came 2nd In UP?

I learnt that Yogi was deeply unhappy with the BJP's choice of Lok Sabha candidates.
He had proposed a list of names, but hardly any of his suggestions were accepted.

An interesting excerpt from Rajdeep Sardesai's new book, 2024: The Election that Surprised India.

In early May 2024, as the temperature soared, so did the election chatter.

Had Yogi Adityanath been excluded during the campaign, or had the Uttar Pradesh chief minister voluntarily distanced himself from it?

Yogi's alleged turf battle with the BJP's central leadership, especially Home Minister Amit Shah, was being whispered about in hushed tones in Uttar Pradesh's power circles, as was the possibility of a change in guard in Lucknow after the elections if the party won big.

Gossip is at its juiciest when there is a kernel of truth to it. The Shah Yogi story fits into this category.

A next-gen battle over who might succeed Narendra Modi in the future was the subject of much political speculation.

Shah was Modi's de facto No. 2, the BJP's crisis manager and chief poll strategist, while Yogi Adityanath was a highly popular leader from the country's numerically decisive state.

Now, in the heat of another big election, the internal tug of war was getting traction once again.

After speaking to multiple sources, I learnt that Yogi was deeply unhappy with the BJP's choice of Lok Sabha candidates.

He had reportedly proposed a list of names, but hardly any of his suggestions were accepted.

One of the sitting MPs Yogi strongly batted for was former army chief and then Union minister General V K Singh, who had won the 2019 elections from Ghaziabad by a massive 5.6 lakh votes.

When he saw that General Singh's name was missing from the 2024 list, Yogi became incensed.

'How can you drop someone of his stature? This will send out the wrong message,' Yogi cautioned at an internal party meeting. The warning went unheeded.

General Singh had reportedly fallen out of favour with the central leadership. Thoroughly put off that the chief minister's nominees were being ignored, the Yogi camp blamed the charmed circle around the home minister, especially Sunil Bansal, the influential BJP general secretary referred to by Adityanath's supporters as 'Chhota Chanakya'.

Another 'suspect' was the director of a national news TV network who had easy access to Shah and was accused by his critics of 'deal-making'.

'These guys sitting in their air-conditioned rooms in Delhi seem to know more than us on the ground in Uttar Pradesh,' argued a Yogi supporter.

Amit Shah undoubtedly had a special interest in Uttar Pradesh. It was here, after all, as general secretary in charge of India's most politically crucial state, that he had acquired a national profile by spearheading the BJP's spectacular 2014 win.

Shah had his own loyalists in the Uttar Pradesh BJP unit, not all of whom saw eye to eye with Yogi Adityanath.

The hands-on organizational man Bansal was one of them, deriving his power from his proximity to the central leadership, but in August 2022, he was moved out of his post as Uttar Pradesh BJP organizational secretary and given charge of West Bengal, Odisha and Telangana instead.

His departure established Yogi, the face of the BJP's impressive 2022 assembly victory, as the only power centre in the state.

'Yogi takes decisions without consulting any BJP leader; no minister, no MP, no MLA has any role in governance. Only a handful of bureaucrats matter,' lamented an MLA.

'At least when Bansalji was around, we could complain to him -- now there is no one.'

Accusations that the chief minister was promoting members from his Thakur community at the cost of the BJP's Brahmin and OBC leaders added to the murmurs of discontent.

Keshav Prasad Maurya, Yogi's deputy chief minister and the party's OBC face, was the leader of the dissident group.

Maurya was convinced that Yogi's loyalists had conspired to defeat him in the 2022 assembly polls.

Even though the chief minister and his deputy lived just 75 metres away from each other on Lucknow's Kalidas Marg, the city's VVIP hub, they hadn't visited each other's residences in almost five years.

The only time Yogi came calling was once in 2021, to bless Maurya's newly wed son and daughter-in law.

He had skipped the marriage ceremony and reception, which was attended by the top brass of the Sangh Parivar.

'A few senior RSS leaders had to persuade Yogi to at least maintain cordial relations with his deputy in public, but the truth is, there was a complete breakdown in ties,' confessed a senior Uttar Pradesh leader.

The BJP's predicament in Yogi-led Uttar Pradesh was not unlike that faced by the party during the Modi years in Gujarat.

Then, as chief minister, Modi was blamed for sidelining all potential challengers to his chair. Now, Yogi, a saffron-clad self-proclaimed 'monk' endorsed by the party's rank and file for his extremist Hindutva stance but accused by his peers of running a one-man show, was facing similar charges.

As decision-making became excessively centralized in both Delhi and Lucknow, the fault lines within the BJP widened.

Excerpted from 2024: The Election that Surprised India by Rajdeep Sardesai HarpersCollins, with the publisher's kind permission.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com