Caste Math, Complacency Or Candidate Pick? Rumbling In Uttar Pradesh BJP Over What Went Wrong In Election 2024

A section of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders from Uttar Pradesh has blamed “over-confidence” and “caste politics” for the party’s losses in the Lok Sabha election 2024. Factors like ticket distribution, PDA (pichada, Dalits, alpsahkhyaks or minorities) outreach, and anger among the Rajput community are believed to have helped the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance in UP win 43 of the 80 seats.

Akhilesh Yadav-led SP emerged as the single-largest party in India’s most populous state, winning 37 of UP’s 80 seats. It had won just five seats in 2019. The Yadav party played a key role in reducing the ruling BJP’s tally to 33 seats from the 62 it won in the 2019 polls. It also prevented the BJP from reaching the majority mark of 272 on its own.

Introspecting the poll debacle, Uttar Pradesh Finance Minister Suresh Khanna said, “This election has been impacted by caste politics. Casteist remarks were not made in 2019. Also, overconfidence has to be blamed as most of us had declared ourselves even before results.”

BJP leader Sakshi Maharaj said, “Of course, there must be something that led to the losses even after the party, especially PM Modi, worked so hard.” He added that the BJP government had improved the law-and-order situation in the state.

UP Minister Sanjay Nishad, whose son Praveen Nishad lost the elections from the Santkabir Nagar seat, said, “The non-Jatav Dalits were made to believe that the constitution will be changed, so we lost. Even other Dalit and OBC votes were lost. We will analyse what went wrong.”

Senior BJP leader and former Rajya Sabha member Harnath Singh Yadav said, “I have not been able to dissociate myself from the current political situation which has developed in Uttar Pradesh. I feel hurt because our party deserved at least 75 seats in UP, where did we lag? Our party leadership needs to think about it. PM Narendra Modi is known to everyone in villages, towns, and cities. He has made many important decisions, especially for the people of Uttar Pradesh.

“Even though we have received less number of seats, people still believe in him and NDA will form the government… The party leadership needs to discuss what went wrong with each constituency and why we lost… It should be investigated as to who betrayed the party leadership and played their part against party candidates,” he said.

Union Minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti said, “I think I received a better result than what was the situation in Fatehpur. 15 days prior to polling, I felt that there was definitely something wrong here. But our ground workers worked hard here. I also felt that the work we started in Fatehpur faced obstruction somewhere.”

Despite the fact that under BJP’s leadership, the Ram Mandir was inaugurated in Ayodhya in January this year, party leader Lallu Singh lost the Faizabad constituency, where the temple is situated, to Samajwadi Party candidate Awadhesh Prasad.

Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav spoke on BJP’s loss from Faizabad (Ayodhya) and said, “The truth is that the BJP would have lost even more seats in Uttar Pradesh. I thank the people of Ayodhya. You would have seen the pain of Ayodhya from time to time. They were not given adequate compensation for their land, injustice was done to them, their land was not acquired at par with the market price, you snatched their land forcibly by slapping false cases against them…you destroyed the poor for a sacred thing. That is why, I think people of Ayodhya and neighbouring areas voted against the BJP.”