4 min readNew DelhiJul 29, 2024 10:13 PM IST
First published on: Jul 28, 2024 at 09:10 PM IST
With the appointment of veteran BJP leader Santosh Kumar Gangwar as the Governor of Jharkhand, which goes to polls later this year, the party has appeared to send a signal to Other Backward Class (OBC) Kurmi community whose votes shifted to a significant degree towards the Opposition INDIA alliance in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
Gangwar, among the nine new governors appointed on Saturday, is an OBC leader from the Kurmi community, a traditional BJP voter base that veered to the Opposition in UP and Bihar in the parliamentary polls. The decision to deny him a ticket to contest from the Bareilly Lok Sabha seat had upset his supporters and a large section of Kurmi voters in Bareilly and adjoining constituencies such as Badaun and Aonla. Though the BJP won Bareilly, it lost both Badaun and Aonla.
Gangwar, who made his electoral debut with the BJP, was first elected as an MP from Bareilly in 1989 and he represented the seat for a record eight terms, the first six of which were consecutive. His only loss was in 2009 to Praveen Singh Aron, then of the Congress.
In the BJP governments at the Centre, Gangwar served as the Minister of State (MoS) and MoS (independent charge) in various ministries such as Petroleum and Natural Gas, Science and Technology, Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, Textiles, Parliamentary Affairs, Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, Finance, and Labour and Employment.
He was a minister in the first and second terms of the Narendra Modi government but was dropped during a reshuffle to accommodate new faces in July 2021. At the time, he was an MoS (independent charge) for Labour and Employment.
Two months before being dropped as a minister, Gangwar, in May 2021, wrote to UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath complaining about delays in hospital admission for Covid-19 patients, black marketing of medical equipment such as ventilators, and key health officials in his Lok Sabha constituency of Bareilly not responding to phone calls. After his letter, the administration issued fresh instructions to health officials to be mindful of the issues raised by the MP.
A law graduate, Gangwar is known in Bareilly as a “down-to-earth politician” and has been able to win votes from Muslims because of his “personal connection” with locals. In 2024, too, he was preparing to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Bareilly, as he had done over the past three decades. But his supporters were left shocked when the BJP dropped him and gave the ticket to Chhatrapal Singh Gangwar, a former state minister who also is Kurmi.
Sources in the BJP said Gangwar was denied the ticket because of internal differences within the BJP, particularly within his community. The Gangwars are a farming community that is the largest and most dominant OBC group in central UP’s Ruhelkhand region and has over three lakh voters in Bareilly.
Against the backdrop of rising resentment among Kurmis, Modi held a 45-minute roadshow during the Lok Sabha campaign in Bareilly — a constituency he had not visited for campaigning five years earlier — on April 26 along with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Gangwar, too, was present at the roadshow. A day before, the PM addressed another public meeting in Bareilly district, where Gangwar shared the stage with him. But the community could not be pacified. Though Chhatrapal Singh defeated Aron, who contested on an SP ticket, and retained Bareilly, his margin was 34,804 votes, way down from the 1.67 lakh votes with which Gangwar had won five years earlier.
Gangwar, who made his electoral debut with the BJP, was first elected as an MP from Bareilly in 1989 and he represented the seat for a record eight terms, the first six of which were consecutive. (Photo: X/ @santoshgangwar) 
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