Modi's UP Challenge

LARGE MANDATES COME with large responsibilities.

- Minhaz Merchant

Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows that the next two years of his tenure pose an even greater challenge than the last three. The newest challenge is to manage expectations in Uttar Pradesh. By appointing a polarising chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, Modi has decided to take UP’s festering communal cauldron head-on.

For decades, the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) used religion and caste to divide UP. It worked. With captive vote banks of Yadavs, Muslims and Dalits, the SP and the BSP dominated UP’s electoral politics for 15 years.

By choosing 44-year-old, five-time Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath (a Thakur) as chief minister, Modi has put politics first: if anyone can deliver UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats in 2019, it is Adityanath. As one BJP leader said wryly, “When you pick Yogi Adityanath to lead the biggest State, you do not have to scream from the top of the roof that you stand with the Hindus.”

By picking two deputy chief ministers from opposite sides of the caste spectrum, Modi has continued to place faith in the rainbow coalition that helped the BJP deliver an extraordinary mandate in the UP State Assembly election. Dinesh Sharma, a Brahmin, will consolidate the upper caste vote leading up to 2019. Brahmins anyway vote for the BJP, but Sharma as deputy chief minister will allay any fears that OBCs would dominate the administration. Keshav Prasad Maurya, the other deputy chief minister, is an OBC. As State Party President, he led the BJP campaign in UP and delivered. He completes the rainbow coalition for the BJP, straddling the entire spectrum from upper castes to most backward castes (MBCs).