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BJP’s Uttar Pradesh poll team holds discussions with Yogi, others
Led by Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the Uttar Pradesh poll team would visit Gorakhpur on Thursday
The new election panel appointed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership for poll-bound Uttar Pradesh arrived in Lucknow and straightaway got down to business, holding meetings with top party leaders, including chief minister Yogi Adityanath at the party’s state unit office here on Wednesday evening. The Uttar Pradesh assembly election is due early next year.
The election panel comprising Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, information and broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur, along with other leaders, held the meetings in which top ministers and deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma were also present.
“Now, we will also see regular visits by top leaders. Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be in USA, but the party has begun giving finishing touches to Modiji’s visits as well as that of Union home minister Amit Shah and BJP chief JP Nadda (to the state). Defence minister Rajnath Singh is an MP from Lucknow and hence an integral part of the party’s UP campaign. So, from chief ministers of BJP ruled states to others, we would see regular visits by top leaders now,” said a BJP leader.
While Pradhan’s choice makes it obvious that the BJP would focus on non-Yadav OBCs, the BJP has only recently appointed Baby Rani Maurya, a Dalit woman leader from Agra, as the party’s national vice-president. Maurya was till recently the Uttarakhand governor until her surprise decision to quit her post, two years before the formal close of her five-year gubernatorial term, indicating that the party would use her in 2022 UP polls.
“The BJP is all set for Mission UP. We are confident that our government’s various welfare activities, our top leadership’s appeal and concern for the common man and our party’s micro, booth level planning would lead us to win. The misinformation campaign against us by the Opposition parties would be exposed and we would win with an even better margin than before,” said a UP minister who was part of the meeting at the party office.
While Pradhan, a prominent OBC face of the party who has been the party’s election in-charge of other states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh, is heading the election panel for UP, the seven co-in-charges include minister for information and broadcasting Anurag Thakur, minister of state for parliamentary affairs Arjun Meghwal, minister of state for agriculture and farmers’ welfare Shobha Karandlaje, minister of state for education Annpurna Devi, former national general secretary Saroj Pandey; MP Vivek Thakur and former Haryana minister Captain Abhimanyu.
After this meeting, the election panel would travel to Gorakhpur on Thursday and return again to hold another round of meetings in the state capital before leaving for Delhi.
“Before arriving in Lucknow, BJP’s UP in-charge Radha Mohan Singh and election in-charge Dharmendra Pradhan had held discussions in Delhi. So, in a sense, the election panel has arrived in UP after doing its homework,” party leaders said.
“Let’s see. It should be clear in a day or two,” a party leader said when asked if the election panel’s deliberations and several rounds of meetings would also lead to the much-delayed announcement about four MLCs and some clarity on whether Adityanath government’s much speculated expansion of the ministry would happen. The BJP has also appointed six regional in-charges to shore up the organisational strength and help with the campaign. They are Lok Sabha MP Sanjay Bhatia (west UP), Bihar MLA Sanjeev Chaurasia (Braj), BJP national secretary Y Satya Kumar (Awadh), national co-treasurer (Kanpur-Bundelkhand), national secretary Arvind Menon (Gorakhpur) and Sunil Ojha (Kashi).
