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

Story Of The Day

Workplace Discipline Does Not Require a Police Complaint
OPINIONS : Strongly Expressed

June 22, 2026

People Are Talking About

People Say TMC Is Reaping What It Had Sown

News Snippets

  • FSSAI to now train its lenses on claims like 'natural', 'heart-friendly' 'healthy' and 'no added sugar' etc to reduce instaces of misleading claims on food packaging
  • 5 killed and 18 injured as the under-construction roof of the Hanuman temple in Parbhani in Maharashtra collapses
  • Hindus in Bangladesh hold torch marches in Dhaka and other parts of the country to protest against alleged government inaction after vandalism at temples and hitting Hindu dieties with shoes during a procession
  • LIC issues notice to Suruchi Sangha (formerly controlled by TMC minister Aroop Biswas) to vacate 23 cottahs of land in Kolkata's upscale New Alipore area, which the club has allegedly poached on to hold its annual Durga Puja, within a month
  • Centre bans 16 fixed drug combinations, including painkillers, anti-biotics and skin fromulations, over safety issues
  • TMC news: Aroop Biswas and Firhad Hakim, once considered the right and left hands of Mamata Banerjee, now fall out of favour. Biswas issued showcause for writing s debit-freeze letter to HDFC Bank blocking party funds and Hakim removed from disciplinary committee
  • From Tarakeshwar in Bengal, PM Modi gives a call for 'new Bengal' and says the period of 'cut money' has ended and work has started on stalled projects in the state with the BJP government taking decisions at 'lightening speed'
  • A trader in Noida found a Rs 25l akh diamond in a Panna mine registered in his wife's name
  • 22.7 lakh to sit for NEET retest today
  • FIFA World Cup: Brazil get into the groove, score 3 against Haiti for a 3-0 win
  • FIFA World Cup: Paraguay beat Turkiye 1-0
  • FIFA World Cup: USA beat Australia 2-0 to enter knockouts and Morocco beat Scotland 1-0
  • ICC T20 Women's World Cup: India to play South Africa today
  • Nations Cup Women's Hockey: India thrash Chile 6-0 in the semifinals to set up a clash with New Zealand in the final
  • 3rd ODI versus Afghanistan: Yasashvi Jaiswal (110 not out) and Prasidh Krishna (5-23) shine as India (224 for 1) beat Afghanistan (218) by 9 wickets in the 3rd and final ODI to sepp the series 3-0
PM Modi celebrates International Yoga Day with more than 40000 people from Red Road in Kolkata /////// NEET re-test today with NTA saying it is committed to conduct it smoothly
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. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

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. 

Other Stories You Make Like

Editorials

Punjab's Unfinished Debate

Punjab's Unfinished Debate

 The Dancing Girl Doesn't Need a Moral Guardian

The Dancing Girl Doesn't Need a Moral Guardian

In Depth

When Power Goes, the Mask Comes Off

When Power Goes, the Mask Comes Off

Editor's Pick

Indians Lose Thousands of Crores to Cyber Fraud. Why Don't Banks Pay?

Indians Lose Thousands of Crores to Cyber Fraud. Why Don't Banks Pay?
© 2014 India Commentary. All rights reserved.