Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has taken it upon himself to reverse the BJP’s fortunes in the upcoming bypolls after the party suffered a shock result in the Lok Sabha elections as its tally dropped from 62 to 33 — nearly half.
Last time, the BJP won only three of these 10 seats while NDA allies — NISHAD party and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD)— won two. The remaining five were won by the Samajwadi Party.
Sources said on Sunday, as India celebrated the World Cup win, Yogi Adityanath put all hands on deck to discuss strategies for the upcoming bypolls. BJP sources said the chief minister has set an ambitious target of winning all 10 seats.
Chaudhary Bhupendra Singh, president of BJP’s Uttar Pradesh unit, was the first to take responsibility for BJP’s poor show in the state and handed his resignation to party national president JP Nadda. BJP sent out teams of senior leaders to take feedback with a set of questions to find out why it lost. It now seems to indicate both rivalries within the party as well as hostile government servants favouring the Samajwadi Party during the election led to the loss.
Now, the chief minister has taken control of the strategy to win the upcoming bypolls in the state.
SUNDAY MEETING & SPECIAL 16
On June 30, the entire Yogi cabinet was present in the meeting along with their deputies. The only absentee was Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar. The meeting, sources said, was about the 10 bypolls.
The chief minister formed a special team of 16 ministers, making them in-charge of respective seats. These ministers, sources said, have been given the power to take calls locally which also makes them accountable for the results they bring. There are six assembly constituencies — Milkipur, Katheri, Sisamau, Phulpur, Mirapur and Kundarki — which will have two ministers each as in-charges each for the seats. However, the remaining four seats will have one minister each as in-charge.
Karhal, which was vacated by SP chief Akhilesh Yadav after he won the Lok Sabha election from Kannauj, has been assigned to UP tourism minister Jayveer Singh. The choice is significant, given Singh unsuccessfully fought against Yadav’s wife Dimple from Mainpuri. Similarly, Phulpur, Khair and Ghaziabad Sadar — which were won by the BJP — have been assigned to Dayashankar Singh and Rakesh Sachan, Lakshmi Narayan Chaudhary and Sunil Sharma respectively.
Not only BJP ministers but those from the alliance have been put on the job as is the case in Sisamau. NISHAD party chief Sanjay Nishad, along with state finance minister Suresh Khanna, will work together to snatch back Sisamau from SP.
Adityanath will not just directly supervise the entire process but micro-manage to the extent of taking regular updates from each of these 10 seats — similar to what Home Minister Amit Shah did during the Madhya Pradesh assembly election last year.
CRACKING THE WHIP ON BABUS, COPS
In its search for why BJP lost so many seats in Uttar Pradesh, one of the few prominent reasons that came out was Babus were unfriendly at best and hostile at worst, siding with the Samajwadi Party. The government quickly transferred 12 District Magistrates in the end of June. Interestingly, 11 of them headed districts where the BJP lost.
Sitapur, Banda, Basti, Shrawasti, Kaushambi, Sambhal, Saharanpur, Moradabad and Hathras Lok Sabha constituencies saw their DMs being summarily transferred. The DMs of Kasganj, Chitrakoot, and Auraiya too faced similar consequences. Etah, Banda, and Etawa — areas considered SP strongholds — fall under these three districts.
Yogi Adityanath recently appointed his trusted bureaucrat — Manoj Kumar Singh — as the Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh. The tenure of 1984 batch Durga Shankar Mishra was not extended after June 30 as he had received three extensions already.
The Yogi Adityanath government also made a series of transfers among the police top echelons. It transferred the Commissioners of Police of Lucknow and Prayagraj apart from transferring 14 more IPS officers. Amrendra K Sengar, an IPS officer of the 1995 batch, took over as the Lucknow Police Commissioner while 2001 batch IPS officer Tarun Gauba was posted as the Prayagraj Police Commissioner.
The message was loud and clear that the government had a trust deficit with the transferred babus and IPS officers. The new appointments show the BJP has learnt its lesson and wants to win as many seats as possible in the bypolls to heal its June 4 wound.
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