In BJP’s Ghosi defeat fallout, eastern UP allies face the heat before Lok Sabha polls

BJP sources said the party’s defeat in Ghosi has also raised questions over the popularity of its ministers from eastern UP, who had been inducted into Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s Cabinet as faces of their respective communities but failed to check the votes of the upper castes, Dalits, OBCs and Muslims from being shifted to the SP.

Among the OBC voters in Ghosi, there are an estimated 54,000 Chauhan voters and 50,000 Rajbhars. Since 1996, the seat has been won by a Chauhan candidate in all but one Assembly election.

Sources said both Dara Singh Chauhan and Om Prakash Rajbhar, the Zahoorabad MLA, were hopeful of bagging Cabinet berths in the Adityanath government in the event of the BJP’s win in the Ghosi bypoll.

In the 2022 Assembly elections, Chauhan had won the Ghosi seat as an SP candidate, with 1.1 lakh votes or 42.2 per cent of the total votes. At the time, Rajbhar was also allied with the SP.

But about 16 months down the line, Chauhan has now lost the same seat as a BJP candidate backed by the party’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies like the SBSP.

The SP’s candidate Sudhakar, who belongs to the upper caste Rajput community, got 1.2 lakh votes in the bypoll — about 16,000 more votes than Chauhan’s tally as an SP candidate in the 2022 Assembly election. Chauhan could win only 81,668 votes this time.

In July this year, the BJP had welcomed Chauhan into its fold with a grand show at the party headquarters. The SBSP, too, had joined the NDA at the same time amid much hype. The BJP decided to ally with the SBSP following a survey that found Rajbhar’s party could help the party win 12 Lok Sabha seats in eastern UP, including Ghosi.

Rajbhar has demanded a Lok Sabha ticket from the Ghosi constituency for the 2024 polls. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the SBSP had won over 40,000 votes in Ghosi and finished third. Chauhan had previously won the Ghosi Lok Sabha seat on a BSP ticket in 2009.

Rajbhar was under pressure to ensure a positive result for the BJP in the Ghosi bypoll – he spent 18 days camped in Ghosi, with his sons and party general secretaries, Arvind and Arun, and held “jan chaupals” in over 250 villages, most of which have large Rajbhar communities.

The BJP has two other allies in UP – the Apna Dal (S), which draws its support from the Kurmi community, and the Nishad Party, backed by the Nishad community. Since these communities make up relatively small proportions of Ghosi’s population, the BJP had tasked the SBSP with consolidating the Rajbhar and OBC votes for Chauhan. The saffron party was also expecting Chauhan to secure the backing of his own community.

The SBSP’s general secretary Arun Rajbhar claimed his party fulfilled its responsibility but Chauhan’s “outsider” status hurt his candidature. “The SBSP campaigned for Dara Singh Chauhan with complete dedication and succeeded in transferring Rajbhar votes to him. Chauhan got over 90 per cent of Rajbhar votes. But he lost because there was public sentiment against him and the Opposition succeeded in cashing in on the ‘local versus outsider’ factor. The election had become Dara Singh versus Sudhakar. Even Dalits, in the BSP’s absence, voted for Sudhakar because he is a local. If BJP had fielded a local candidate, he would have won by a huge margin,” Arun said, adding that the SP got a majority of Nishad votes, too, for the same reason.

Arun insisted that the SBSP-BJP alliance would remain intact. “This bypoll result is not going to affect our alliance. We will fight Lok Sabha together and win,” he said.

A BJP leader, however, said, “After this result, the BJP will certainly feel less pressure from allies in seat- sharing in Lok Sabha polls. The bargaining power of the SBSP has weakened.”

The SBSP had contested the 2017 Assembly polls in alliance with the BJP, following which Om Prakash Rajbhar was inducted into the Adityanath government 1.0 as a minister. But ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he had parted ways with the BJP after a tussle over seat-sharing.

In the 2022 Assembly polls, the SBSP had forged an alliance with the SP, winning six of the 19 seats it had contested. However, this alliance could not last long.

Notably, the BJP’s all three allies are based in eastern UP, while the SP’s partners like the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Congress have barely any influence in Ghosi. In the 2022 Assembly polls, the Congress had got only 2,012 votes in the Ghosi seat.