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Illustration: Binay Sinha
A cryptic post by Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya has caused a flutter in political circles.
In a post on X, the office of the Deputy CM quoted Maurya as saying, “The organization is bigger than the government, the pain of the workers is my pain. No one is bigger than the organization, the workers are the pride.”
The post followed a meeting of the UP Deputy CM with BJP party President JP Nadda in Delhi on Tuesday. Nadda also held a separate meeting with the Uttar Pradesh BJP Chief Bhupender Chaudhary.
Maurya is currently serving his second term as the Deputy CM of the state. In 2017 he was the state BJP President when the BJP formed the majority government under CM Yogi Adityanth with 312 seats in the Assembly. In the 2022 elections, Maurya lost the Assembly election but continued in his position as Deputy CM along with Brijesh Pathak, he was later elected to the Legislative Council.
Earlier, on June 14 this year a state working committee meeting of the BJP was held in Lucknow in which Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said that overconfidence had hurt their expectation. The BJP had fared poorly in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
“We have to hoist the BJP flag in the state once again. BJP leaders and workers will have to be super active on social media and immediately refute any kind of rumours,” Adityanath said.
The chief minister stated that under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi, they had maintained constant pressure on the opposition in UP, achieving great success in 2014, 2017, 2019 and 2022.
“The percentage of votes that were in favour of BJP in 2014 and subsequent elections, BJP has been successful in getting the same number of votes in 2024 as well, but the shifting of votes and overconfidence have hurt our expectations. The opposition, which had earlier accepted defeat and sat down, is again jumping and dancing today,” the UP Chief Minister said.
“Everyone will have to be active from now on for the assembly by-elections to be held on 10 seats in the state and the 2027 assembly elections,” adding that along with Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs, MLAs, MLCs, District Panchayat Presidents, Mayors, Block Pramukhs, Chairman and Councilors, everyone should start preparing for the 2027 assembly elections from today itself,” Adityanath said.
The BJP won 33 seats in the Lok Sabha polls 2024, down from 62 it had won out of the total 80 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general elections.
Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party President and MP Akhilesh Yadav chose to wade into the issue with a dig at the BJP alleging that BJP’s fight for power meant it wasn’t thinking about the public.
“In the heat of BJP’s fight for power, governance and administration in UP have been put on the back burner. The work of sabotage politics that the BJP used to do in other parties is now being done inside its party. That is why the BJP is sinking into a quagmire of internal conflicts. No one in the BJP thinks about the public,” Yadav posted on X.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First Published: Jul 17 2024 | 3:57 PM IST
