New Delhi: The first major meeting of the Uttar Pradesh BJP unit Sunday after the Lok Sabha seat losses in the state has made news for Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya speaking his mind and his apparent rift with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
The meeting in Lucknow, attended by around 2,000 BJP leaders and workers, was ostensibly held to send a message of unity and boost the cadre’s morale. However, Maurya, in his first statement after the poll debacle, pointed out that “the party organisation is bigger than the government and nobody is bigger than the organisation”.
“Every BJP worker is our prestige. I am a BJP worker first and deputy chief minister later and my door always remained open for everybody,” he said, with his words being seen as a dig at Adityanath and the state bureaucracy that reportedly ignored the public issues raised by BJP workers.
The party could win only 33 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP this year, down from 62 it had won in 2019.
Adityanath, too, at the meeting, in an apparent message to those attacking his government and those who worked against the party during the elections, said that “if the government faced a setback in 2027 (UP state elections), then everybody will be affected from top to bottom” and that “prestige is there till there is power”.
Speaking to ThePrint, a BJP leader who was present at the meeting, said: “The crux of the meeting was Maurya’s dig at the CM and his administration, although party president J.P. Nadda and Adityanath too tried to defuse the situation by saying that every leader is a worker and if the government is defeated, everybody will face heat in 2027.”
“The meeting had been organised to show a united face and galvanise the cadres but the message that has gone out is about the rift between the two leaders,” he added.
Nadda lauded Adityanath’s work in the state, saying: “There was a time when people were leaving Uttar Pradesh for other states due to law and order issues. Today, mafia raj (rule) is over. In the last 10 years, Uttar Pradesh has progressed a lot. The state’s economy is at second position in the country.”
“Every leader is a worker first and every worker is a leader too. Every worker has the strength to face challenges,” he added.
State BJP president Bhupendra Chaudhary too assured the workers that the “BJP is a cadre-based party and protecting its workers’ respect is its first priority”.
“There will be no compromise on that. The BJP is standing with its workers,” he asserted.
According to the BJP leader mentioned earlier, a core committee meeting was held later and it focused on winning the 10 UP assembly seats due for bye-election and on fine-tuning the party organisation and government machinery. “Already, the chief minister has transferred more than a dozen district magistrates and police superintendents and more will done to assuage the cadre and workers’ sentiments,” the leader told ThePrint.
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Maurya speaks out
Maurya is said to be close to home minister Amit Shah and was made the deputy CM for the second time in 2022 despite his defeat from Sirathu assembly seat in the state elections that year.
Five months after the assembly polls, he had stated on social media that the “organisation is bigger than government”, in the wake of reports of his several disagreements with Adityanath.
Since the BJP’s dismal performance in the Lok Sabha polls in UP this year, Maurya did not participate in two cabinet meetings and one review meeting, raising apprehensions of trouble between the CM and his deputy again.
On social media Monday, Maurya wrote what he said the previous day: “Karmaveer does not care about victory or defeat. Workers are my pride and my honour” and that “organisation is bigger than the government… No one is bigger than the organisation!”
The UP BJP’s Sunday meeting was the talk among political circles, with many BJP leaders who were defeated in the Lok Sabha polls and who have been mounting pressure on the CM meeting Maurya Monday. These include Sanjeev Balyan, who lost as BJP candidate from Muzaffarnagar and accused former party MLA Sangeet Som of having a hand in his defeat; a Rajput leader close to the CM; and Praveen Nishad who too lost his Lok Sabha seat.
Nishad met Maurya along with cabinet minister Sanjay Nishad who is said to be demanding an assembly seat from the 10 going for the bypolls, according to BJP sources.
Maurya at the meeting also blamed the Opposition for the BJP’s losses and assured workers that they would together beat their rivals in 2027.
The CM, on his part, said the “BJP government is in power in the state and that is why there is a mayor, nagar pallika president, block president and councillor in every district. If government is dented in 2027, everybody will face the heat, and that’s why every worker along with public representatives should begin working to get BJP back to power in 2027”.
“Every worker should make a promise to ensure the victory of the lotus,” he asserted.
CM’s reasons for BJP losing UP seats
At Sunday’s meeting, Adityanath counted four factors behind the BJP’s poor showing — overconfidence, inability to communicate the “double engine” government achievements, division of votes due to the Opposition’s campaign alleging that the BJP would change the Constitution if given a supermajority, and poor social media outreach of the BJP.
“We have got a similar vote percentage as what we got in 2014, 2017, 2019 and 2022 and we achieved a huge victory by cornering the Opposition. But we got overconfident that we are winning and such a setback occurred. The Opposition which had earlier accepted defeat and sat down is again jumping and dancing today,” he said.
The inability to communicate our achievements was another reason behind our defeat, he explained, adding that the BJP government had worked without discrimination as opposed to the previous Samajwadi Party rule.
“The Samajwadi Party humiliated Dalit icons. They stopped scholarships for Dalit students, but the BJP government started them again in 2017. During the election, we could not popularise our achievements,” he said, proceeding to talk about the “BJP’s failure to counter the opposition on social media”.
“Using this social media, opposition forces and foreigners were engaged in a conspiracy in which they became successful. We are people with a nationalist mission. BJP workers have to see what is happening on social media. We have to immediately refute the rumours,” the CM said, apparently targeting the party organisation.
A day after the meeting, BJP MLC Devendra Pratap wrote to Adityanath saying that bureaucratic corruption in the state was damaging the government’s image.
On Saturday, Ramesh Chandra, MLA from Badlapur, had told the media that the BJP’s situation was bad and it was not in a position to form a government in UP in 2027.
Earlier, senior BJP leader Rajendra Pratap Singh alias Moti Singh, had alleged at a meeting that he had never seen such large-scale corruption in tehsils and police stations as he was witnessing under the present dispensation. A video clip of his statement was viral.
Speaking to ThePrint, a state minister said, “Many MLAs who are targeting the state government are making allegations on behalf of a few leaders to corner Adityanath. They are blaming him for the lacklustre performance but the fact is that tickets were decided by the Delhi high command against local feedback.”
“A blame game has now started to dent the CM and the motive is clear,” the minister added.
Previously, BJP national general secretary B.L. Santhosh had met the CM and party leaders in Lucknow to ascertain the reasons behind the party’s dismal performance in the state.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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