While it would be premature to say that the Yogi Adityanath government is on its way out, the recent spate of resignations by Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs, including cabinet ministers, is indeed a worrying signal for the ruling party.
Swami Prasad Maurya, minister of labor & employment and a prominent OBC leader, began the mini-exodus a couple of days ago. Another prominent OBC face, Dara Singh Chauhan, who held the portfolio of forests & animal husbandry, followed suit the next day. Today it was the turn of Dharam Singh Saini, the Ayush minister.
More OBC leaders are reported to be contemplating their future outside the saffron party.
A couple of days after quitting the BJP, Maurya tweeted in Hindi, “The RSS is like a cobra, BJP is like a snake. Swami Prasad Maurya is like the mongoose who won’t give up till they are wiped out from UP.”
This is old imagery that the Bahujan Samaj Party, his former party, employed to describe the BJP and the Congress. Claiming that “the endgame has begun for the BJP,” he denounced the BJP for crushing the rights of Dalits, unemployed, farmers and others. He is said to be headed towards Ahiklesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party.
Chauhan too seems to be going with the SP; he even met Yadav after his resignation. Like Maurya, Chauhan has also accused the BJP of doing “khilwad” (messing up) with the reservation of backwards and Dalits.
Saini’s complaint is also on similar lines; he has blamed the BJP for its “gross neglect” of towards Dalits, backwards, farmers, unemployed youth and small traders.
Other BJP MLAs including Brajesh Prajapati, Roshan Lal Varma, Bhagwati Sagar, Mukesh Verma, and Vinay Shakya, have left the BJP.
The rebellion by BJP MLAs, especially by ministers, smacks of disingenuousness rather than heartfelt disgust with the functioning of the Adityanath government. For it is not that the state government has done something very different in the last few months. It has been pushing the hard Hindutva agenda from day one; if these worthies were so uncomfortable with it, they should have quit the saffron party much earlier.
At any rate, the BJP’s prospects may suffer because of the resignations in the run-up to the all-important UP Assembly poll.