oppn parties Another UP Minister Quits, Deepening The Crisis For The BJP In The State

News Snippets

  • The Indian envoy in Bangladesh was summoned by the country's government over the breach in the Bangladesh mission in Agartala
  • Bank account to soon have 4 nominees each
  • TMC and SP stayed away from the INDIA bloc protest over the Adani issue in the Lok Sabha
  • Delhi HC stops the police from arresting Nadeem Khan over a viral video which the police claimed promoted 'enmity'. Court says 'India's harmony not so fragile'
  • Trafiksol asked to refund IPO money by Sebi on account of alleged fraud
  • Re goes down to 84.76 against the USD but ends flat after RBI intervenes
  • Sin goods like tobacco, cigarettes and soft drinks likely to face 35% GST in the post-compensation cess era
  • Bank credit growth slows to 11% (20.6% last year) with retail oans also showing a slowdown
  • Stock markets continue their winning streak on Tuesday: Sensex jumps 597 points to 80845 and Nifty gains 181 points to 24457
  • Asian junior hockey: Defending champions India enter the finals by beating Malaysia 3-1, to play Pakistan for the title
  • Chess World title match: Ding Liren salvages a sraw in the 7th game which he almost lost
  • Experts speculate whether Ding Liren wants the world title match against D Gukesh to go into tie-break after he let off Gukesh easily in the 5th game
  • Tata Memorial Hospital and AIIMS have severely criticized former cricketer and Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu for claiming that his wife fought back cancer with home remedies like haldi, garlic and neem. The hospitals warned the public for not going for such unproven remedies and not delaying treatment as it could prove fatal
  • 3 persons died and scores of policemen wer injured when a survey of a mosque in Sambhal near Bareilly in UP turned violent
  • Bangladesh to review power pacts with Indian companies, including those of the Adani group
D Gukesh is the new chess world champion at 18, the first teen to wear the crown. Capitalizes on an error by Ding Liren to snatch the crown by winning the final game g
oppn parties
Another UP Minister Quits, Deepening The Crisis For The BJP In The State

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2022-01-12 10:55:14

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.

The BJP's diligently constructed house of upper caste and OBC votes in UP is breaking down. Dara Singh Chauhan, another minister in the Yogi Adityanath cabinet and an OBC leader, quit the BJP on Wednesday. S P Maurya and four others had quit on Tuesday. Do these leaders see the writing on the wall for the BJP and are deserting a sinking ship in time or are they being enticed by the Samajvadi Party (SP)? It seems that it is a combination of both as obviously being in government would have offered these leaders greater rewards. But they must be receiving negative feedback from their constituents and with the crowd swelling at each SP rally, think that the time has come for a change of colour.

It took all the wiles of Amit Shah to crisscross the state from 2014 onwards and bring together non-Yadav OBC leaders on the BJP platform. This resulted is a practically invincible vote bank and the BJP stream-rolled the opposition in 2017 state elections and then in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. So what went wrong? Why is the carefully crafted strategy disintegrating at this most important juncture, when elections in UP are so crucial to the party?

Did the party not get wind of the way these OBC leaders were thinking? Why, then, did it not move in to control the damage? With the flight of these leaders, other will be emboldened and more defections cannot be ruled out. The farmers in west UP are already angry. The Yadav's traditionally vote for the SP. The Muslims in UP do not vote for the BJP. Now if the non-Yadav OBC votes are also taken away, the BJP will be left with only the upper caste votes and that would not be enough for it to come back to power. It would be interesting to see the strategy BJP adopts to manage this huge crisis.