It is more to the Uttar Pradesh development than meets the eye. The issue is not just the personality clash between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the chief minister of the most populated state of the country, Yogi Adityanath as is being made out by a section of the media.
Rather the focal point of all these hectic activities within Sangh Parivar is who should be held responsible for the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal, as well as poor performance in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
As the UP chief minister is under intense pressure from a strong section of BJP functionaries – who are reportedly enjoying the patronage of the top leadership – over the mishandling of the second wave of COVID-19, the Yogi camp, as a counter-argument wants that the party should also discuss as to who is to be blamed for the disastrous show in the recent Assembly elections.
So there is a general view within the hard-line supporters of the UP chief minister that a section of leaders want to make him scapegoat to distract the attention from the much larger crisis within the saffron brigade.
The irony of development in West Bengal is that the BJP, with 77 MLAs, is a much weaker party now than it was with just three legislators before the election.
Organisationally the BJP is in a disarray and many of those who had joined the saffron camp ahead of the election, are now thinking in terms of making a home-coming to the Trinamool Congress. This includes former Union minister Mukul Roy.
The tussle between the old guards led by the state unit chief Dilip Ghosh, and the new converts, for example Suvendhu Adhikari, has openly come to light.
The supporters of Modi want to prove that Yogi is in power in Lucknow just because the Prime Minister ensured the victory in 325 seats in the 2017 election.
However, a section of RSS top brass, who otherwise strongly roots for Modi, realise that Yogi deserves a better treatment because as a much younger leader, he is the future face of the BJP. As the Sangh Parivar is in a bind, it wants to go to the UP Assembly poll projecting Yogi, and thus keep Modi a bit away. In this way the UP CM may not feel side-lined. If the BJP wins the election, credit will go to him as well as PM too. But if the saffron party loses, as it is feared, Yogi may momentarily withdraw and in this way the image of Narendra Modi may be saved for 2024 Lok Sabha poll. That is why all move to remove Yogi was thwarted though he was made to become more accommodative.
On the other hand, the moment Modi starts losing the magic touch the saffron party would start disowning him and would go ahead with someone else. That someone else can be Yogi and not Union home minister Amit Shah, who is too big for his boots. Without Modi, Shah is not a powerful personality even in Gujarat.
The biggest example of RSS dumping its top leader is of the party’s patriarch Lal Krishna Advani, who played a huge role in bringing to power the BJP, which after the 1984 Lok Sabha poll was on ventilator. It won only two seats then.
Five years later in 1989 the same Advani led one of the biggest movements which climaxed in 1992 with the demolition of Babri Masjid and subsequently the party came to power in 1998.
But the same Advani was hooted and jeered after his infamous speech exactly 16 summers ago in Pakistan in which he praised Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah. By 2013 he was virtually booted out. Thus, it was Advani, who led the party to the top and in a way contributed to its decline too.
Modi, at present, cannot be compared with Advani, as he is the Prime Minister of the country and can still bounce back. But the recent electoral verdict has certainly made him shaky.
It is not only that many MLAs and MPs of Uttar Pradesh are angry with Yogi, they are equally upset with the way PM Modi and Amit Shah led the whole campaign in West Bengal and the way coronavirus and farmers’ movement are being tackled nationally.
The Modi camp is a bit jittery as many of its supporters concede that neither the PM nor Amit Shah can adopt the West Bengal type strategy in UP, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, the five states which are going to poll early in 2022.
Interestingly, Gujarat, the home turf of Modi and Shah, and Himachal Pradesh will also go to poll in the end of the same year.
As the repeat of the West Bengal electoral strategy may backfire, the saffron party cannot afford to lose any other major state, especially UP, as that would amount to the beginning of the countdown.
But the Modi-Shah duo, according to many analysts, have learnt little lesson from the West Bengal debacle. On June 9 they suddenly roped in Jitin Prasada, a political deadwood and a member of the Group of 23 in the Congress. He could not win the 2017 Assembly election nor the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls. In 2019, he even lost his deposit. Jitin, who hails from an old Congress family of Shahjahanpur in UP, is a Brahmin and was very critical of Yogi over the mistreatment meted out to his caste-men in that state.
Jitin is not even Suvendhu Adhikari, who though could not ensure the victory of the BJP in West Bengal, at least defeated the state chief minister and the leader of Trinamool Congress, Mamata Banerjee, in Nandigram.
Jitin Prasada and bureaucrat-turned-part-time-politician, Arvind Kumar Sharma, a Bhumihar of UP, have been brought to checkmate Yogi. But they have absolutely no base whatsoever. Many political observers feel that in the days to come they may end up becoming liabilities for the BJP.
Yogi has hewed out his place not only in UP, but in national politics as well – it may not be very big – and thus cannot be cut to size so easily.