Of all the five State Assembly elections to be held soon, it is perhaps the one in Uttar Pradesh that is drawing the most attention. Expressing confidence that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government and also party would retain power, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath alluded to this in his recent statement, ‘80 per cent versus 20 per cent’. The intention is clear — to polarise the upcoming elections on communal lines in order to win. After his controversial statement generated much political heat, Mr. Adityanath tried to give his statement a very different interpretation. Apart from such polarisation, he had great faith in the caste-based ‘social engineering’ of the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
But last week, the unthinkable happened when cracks began emerging in the famed ‘social engineering’ of the BJP-RSS in Uttar Pradesh. There was shock and surprise when several Ministers and MLAs, including BJP leader Dharam Singh Saini and senior Minister Swami Prasad Maurya resigned from the party. Many of them have joined the Samajwadi Party (SP) and there is much speculation about more BJP leaders resigning. Most of these leaders are from the non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBC). In recent years, the BJP-RSS combine, under their so-called social engineering agenda, had campaigned to connect the non-Yadav backward castes to ‘Hindutva politics’. There is no doubt that it was successful in this to a great extent.
