BJP'S RETURN GIFTS

Not many outside Uttar Pradesh would have heard of Sanjay Nishad, Om Prakash Rajbhar, Keshav Dev Maurya or Chandrashekhar Azad before election season added some extra centigrades to the warming air.

- Prashant Srivastava

That such leaders of niche, caste-based parties are now highly prized is no surprise in today’s hyper-fragmented polity. What piques interest is only how much voice each carries—and uses for hard bargaining during seat-sharing—in alliances that do not always convey the air of being happy joint families.

Two of the four new faces sworn in on March 5, as the Yogi Adityanath government went in for a long-talked-about cabinet expansion, are from these small parties: Rajbhar, boss of the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), and Anil Kumar of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). Rajbhar, well known for his “pressure tactic” politics, returns to the Yogi cabinet after almost five years. His inclusion comes a day after he criticised the candidature of the BJP’s sitting MP Ravindra Kushwaha for the Salempur LS seat in east UP, proof enough that the party doesn’t take him lightly. The BJP evidently realises his import in Purvanchal—the eastern swathe of UP—where Rajbhar votes matter in at least a dozen Lok Sabha seats. The western UP-based RLD, whose chief Jayant Chaudhary recently cut ties with I.N.D.I.A., got its recompense for hitching its wagon of Jat votes to the NDA.