2024 election in mind, UP BJP set for revamp

LUCKNOW: The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit in Uttar Pradesh is in for an overhaul keeping the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in mind, party leaders indicated. The leadership is currently mulling effecting largescale changes from the main state body to the party’s youth wing and its many morchas.

Most of these changes are required in consonance with the one-man, one-post principle that the party follows.

The main state body is set to have a new chief that some leaders indicated could happen ahead of the two-day national executive meeting in Jaipur from May 20. The BJP has a state chief in Swatantra Dev Singh. After he was sworn in as a cabinet minister in the Yogi government 2.0 on March 25, he communicated his desire to relinquish the state chief’s post to the party leadership in keeping with the party’s one-man, one-post principle.

In the recent past, other UP BJP chiefs Keshav Prasad Maurya, Mahendra Nath Pandey, too, had quit on becoming ministers at the state and at the Centre. Since the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when BJP’s political domination started, the state chiefs have either been Brahmins or from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) community. Swatantra Dev is also an OBC leader belonging to the Kurmi community.

This time, some party leaders feel, the BJP could pick a dalit leader as the state unit chief, which would be a first.

“I believe that the party could prefer going with a dalit as the state BJP chief. That’s because the dalits have supported the BJP in a big way since 2014 and their support has grown with each election. In the 2022 UP assembly polls too, the dalit support helped the BJP as did the fierce rivalry between the SP and the BSP, fielding similar caste candidates to ruin each other’s chances,” a party leader said.

Since 2014 Lok Sabha, the BJP always had a Brahmin state chief ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, another party leader said.

“Laxmikant Bajpai was the UP BJP chief during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, there was Mahendra Nath Pandey. In state assembly elections, the BJP had OBC chiefs – Keshav Prasad Maurya in 2017 and Swatantra Dev in 2022,” a BJP leader said.

State general secretary JPS Rathore and two state vice presidents AK Sharma and Daya Shankar Singh, too, have become ministers and new appointments will be made in the party, BJP leaders said. Narendra Kashyap, the BJP’s OBC chief wing chief in UP has become a minister now. Hence, a new appointment to the post will have to be made soon, party leaders admitted.

There is much speculation on if the party would give any responsibility to Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s sister-in-law Aparna Yadav who joined the BJP earlier this year.

The Congress and the Rashtriya Lok Dal, the state chiefs of which quit after their parties’ below par performance in UP assembly polls, too, are looking to overhaul the party set-up.