BJP may field Brahmin in Gkp, OBC in Phulpur

LUCKNOW : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could choose a Brahmin face for Gorakhpur and an OBC for the Phulpur Lok Sabha by-elections to be held on March 11, party leaders suggest.

The by-elections are being held as chief minister Yogi Adityanath and deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya vacated their Lok Sabha seats on being elected to the UP Legislative Council.

The BJP hasn’t yet declared its candidates for these by-polls.

Adityanath won the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat five times in a row since 1998. Phulpur is a traditional Congress bastion that Maurya won the first time for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

Both Yogi and Maurya, who have already asked the party workers to guard against complacency, are likely to campaign for the candidates cleared by the BJP Parliamentary Board.

Sources in the party said the party is likely to field a Brahmin candidate of chief minister’s choice in Gorakhpur.

Upendra Shukla, the regional chief (kshetriya adhyaksh) of the BJP along with Dwarka Tiwari, a man in his 60s who has been managing the affairs of the Gorakhnath mutt since the days of Yogi’s guru Mahant Avaidyanath, are considered to be frontrunners, say BJP leaders.

“It’s for the party’s parliamentary board to decide names. Whosoever the party chooses will contest and win,” Maurya said without getting into speculation which even included the probability of his wife contesting from the Phulpur seat.

A Maurya aide denied it. “Keshavji is against dynastic rule. There is little merit in this speculation,” he said.

For a while now the local media in Gorakhpur has been speculating the possibility of Yogi mending fences with alleged criminal-turned-politician Hari Shankar Tiwari, his staunch Brahmin rival from the region, and agreeing to field his nephew Ganesh Shankar Pandey from his traditional seat.

The buzz is that Tiwari’s relatives, including his son, have even met BJP chief Amit Shah, people in Gorakhpur claim.

But leaders close to Adityanath have denied the possibility.

“It is unimaginable. One can’t see that happening,” a Yogi aide said.

However the aide admitted that for some reason the buzz has stayed on. “In fact, some from Gorakhpur wanted to know the chief minister’s response to the buzz. He rejected it outright,” the aide said.

In Phulpur, the BJP is expected to benefit from the support of OBC-packed Apna Dal (Anupriya faction) which has considerable hold on Kurmi voters in and around the Lok Sabha seat former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru represented thrice.

The results, slated to be declared on March 14, will have a larger meaning beyond the by-elections, says an analyst.

“A BJP defeat will provide the opposition a chance to link it with recent Rajasthan by-poll loss. A win, especially in Phulpur, will be the right publicity for the party in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections,” political analyst SK Dwivedi says.

The Mahants of the Gorakhnath Mutt have dominated politics in the east UP region since the late 1980s.