Always an also-ran, is BJP leader and UP Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya done waiting?

Maurya’s meeting with another OBC leader, the NISHAD Party’s Sanjay Nishad, came close on the heels of Nishad’s suggestion that “the misuse of bulldozer” was one of the reasons for the NDA’s decline in UP in the Lok Sabha elections.

In another noticeable development, a letter by Maurya seeking details regarding the implementation of reservation guidelines by the Appointments Department recently went public. Sources said the letter dates back to last year, and the recent one was a “reminder”.

It coincided incidentally with a query along similar lines to the UP government by another OBC leader, Anupriya Patel of the Apna Dal (S), who is an ally of the BJP. That letter, suggesting that falling under SC/ST and OBC quota in the state were kept unfilled and gradually became unreserved, was also released publicly.

The Opposition has been playing up these tensions within the BJP and NDA, with Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav recently posting that there is a “monsoon offer” in UP: “Bring 100 (MLAs), form the government”.

But of all the BJP leaders and allies to have suggested that the blame for the party’s fall to 33 seats out of 80 in UP in the Lok Sabha polls lies with the Adityanath government, Maurya carries the most weight.

The Deputy CM is a long-time BJP loyalist, coming from a non-political, humble background, who found his way up the RSS ranks, including a stint in the VHP. He participated in the Ram Temple movement that changed the fortunes of the BJP in UP, is both a one-time MLA and one-time MP from UP, has held different organisational posts in the state unit, and led the BJP in UP when it swept to power in 2017.

Many therefore saw him as the natural claimant to the CM’s post at the time, till Adityanath pipped him. The choice of the Gorakhnath Mutt head and five-time Gorakhpur MP, who is a Thakur originally from Uttarakhand, was a snub also for the reason that he ran his own right-wing outfit Hindu Yuva Vahini till then and was not an RSS product as such.

Maurya was accommodated as a Deputy CM. But here too a compromise was involved as the BJP appointed two deputies to Adityanath, the other being Brahmin leader Dinesh Sharma, in a balancing act to navigate the state’s caste faultlines.

The 2022 Assembly polls in which Maurya suffered a shock defeat from his seat Sirathu is believed to have further hardened ties between him and Adityanath. Maurya’s supporters saw “internal sabotage” in his loss by 7,337 votes from a constituency he had won in 2012, and which the BJP bagged again in 2017 by a margin of over 26,000 votes. In between, in 2014, Maurya won the Lok Sabha polls from the Phulpur seat, once held by Jawaharlal Nehru.

The BJP’s decision to retain Maurya as Deputy CM despite his 2022 Assembly poll loss was seen as a bid by the party to buy peace. However, again, Maurya had to contend with being one of two Deputy CMs; thus put on a par with Brajesh Pathak, who had switched to the BJP from the BSP only before the 2017 Assembly elections.

Unlike Maurya, Pathak is known to be a man of few words, and has kept his counsel after the Lok Sabha results. Which is why his absence lately from post-poll meetings has raised much curiosity. Like Maurya, Adityanath did not name Pathak to panels set up by the BJP for the coming bypolls to 10 Assembly seats in the state, which the CM is desperate to win after the Lok Sabha elections.

However, for Maurya’s camp, it is unfair to hold him and Pathak, 60, to the same standards. A product of student politics at Lucknow University in the early ’90s, Pathak was brought into mainstream politics by the BSP as part of its social engineering politics and sent to the Rajya Sabha. However, Pathak lost the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as a BSP candidate from Unnao and, before the 2017 Assembly elections in UP, joined the BJP in the presence of then BJP president Amit Shah.

In the first Adityanath government, from 2017 to 2022, he served as UP Law Minister. In 2022, he got another promotion and replaced Dinesh Sharma as the Deputy CM.

Now, with Adityanath feeling the heat over the BJP’s poor show in the Lok Sabha polls, finishing behind the SP in the state and short of a simple majority at the Centre, Maurya’s supporters see an opportunity for their leader to be finally recognised as the first among equals.

It was at a working committee meeting of the BJP after the results, where Adityanath was present as was BJP national president J P Nadda and Deputy CM Pathak, that Maurya said that the organisation was above the government, in a clear signal at his role vis-a-vis Adityanath’s.

Maurya posted this again days later, amidst a flurry of meetings between BJP state and central leaders to contain the internal bickering. However, after Akhilesh seized on the remarks to suggest that the UP government was shaky, Maurya forcefully put him down.

But the BJP knows that it would have to tackle the Maurya question soon, especially since the Lok Sabha results indicate that INDIA parties were successful in getting the non-Yadav OBC votes that the BJP has been targeting, including through the promotion of Maurya.