Swami Prasad Maurya, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), The two ministers in the Adityanath government and at least four MLAs who quit the BJP in UP soon after the announcement of assembly election dates, have sought to give an ideological veneer to their resignation from the party. Speaking for the group, Minister for Labour and Employment and influential OBC leader Swami Prasad Maurya said the decision to leave the BJP — by all accounts, they are poised to join the Samajwadi Party — was provoked by the alleged neglect of “Dalits, backwards, farmers, unemployed and small traders” by the Adityanath government. Maurya’s reference to Dalits and backwards is a pointed invocation of caste in the UP poll matrix in a time when the BJP is perceived to have successfully subsumed it in an overarching Hindu identity.
The interplay of Mandal and Mandir that has defined politics in the Hindi heartland since the 1990s may see a rerun in UP 2022. The SP has been working on building an alliance of smaller OBC-centric outfits and leaders to undo the social engineering of the BJP ahead of the 2017 polls. Under the saffron-robed Adityanath, who was pitchforked into the chief minister’s office after the 2017 elections, the BJP was seen to relegate caste appeals and focus on Hindutva. It is anybody’s guess if the current round of defections in UP, in the name of “social justice”, can undercut the BJP’s Hindutva project in the state. Whether or not the defections of Maurya and others become a turning point, or are only plot twists among many more to come in the UP poll arena, remains to be seen.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on January 13, 2022 under the title ‘Twist in UP plot’.
