WOOING THE BRAHMIN VOTER

WHY POLITICAL PARTIES ARE CLAMOURING FOR THE COMMUNITY’S SUPPORT IN UTTAR PRADESH

- Ashish Misra

The ‘encounter’ death of Kanpur-based don Vikas Dubey, while he was in transit with a Uttar Pradesh police contingent, had the nation transfixed in July last year. Dubey’s gang killed seven policemen in an ambush in Bikaru village of Kanpur district on the night of July 2, 2020. Seven days later, he was shot dead too. During the hunt for the don, the police also killed six of his associates. Almost all of them, including Dubey, belonged to the Brahmin caste. Even as he was on the run, social media posts and forums had sprung up hailing him as a “saviour of Brahmins”.

But it was after his death that the community suddenly became a new focus of politics in Uttar Pradesh. Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) national president Mayawati accused the Yogi Adityanath government of trying to intimidate the Brahmin community in UP. In August 2020, Jitin Prasada, who was then a senior Congress leader, started a campaign to mobilise Brahmins through the organisation ‘Brahmin Chetna Parishad’, formed under his patronage. During the Covid transition days, Prasada was very active online on UP Brahmin forums, trying to make a case for the anti-Brahmin bias of the Yogi Adityanath government. He also wrote a letter to Yogi demanding restoration of the state holiday on Parashuram Jayanti, abolished by the BJP government after it was formed in 2017.

But with less than a year to go before the 2022 assembly election in the state, the ruling BJP sprung a surprise. Apprehensive that its Brahmin vote might get dispersed, the party opened its doors to Prasada. On June 9, Union minister Piyush Goyal formally inducted Prasada into the party at the BJP’s national headquarters in Delhi. Soon after this, Adityanath tweeted saying that “Jitin joining BJP will strengthen the party”.