After Azamgarh win, UP BJP begins wooing SP’s Yadav supporters

The BJP is already working on a plan in Uttar Pradesh to attract Yadav voters, who are considered to be a core support base of the Samajwadi Party.

The victory in the Azamgarh bypoll has encouraged the BJP to seek to replicate this success in Yadav strongholds and the SP’s family bastions. Though the victory margin of the BJP was less than 10,000 votes in Azamgarh, party leaders said that the BJP candidate, Dinesh Lal Yadav, got sizeable votes of the Yadav community.

“The Yadav community in UP is feeling dejected with the SP because of the approach and politics of Akhilesh Yadav. The SP is going the extra mile for minority votes and that is not being liked by the community,” Harnath Singh Yadav, BJP Rajya Sabha member from UP told ET. “BJP’s presence is increasing day by day and by 2024 we will be in a position to win all the Lok Sabha seats in UP.”

The BJP has formed a team comprising Union ministers Narendra Singh Tomar, Ashwini Vaishnav, Jitendra Singh and Annapurna Devi to work on the 14 Lok Sabha seats which the party couldn’t win in 2019. Annapurna Devi hails from Yadav community and she has been asked to look after the Yadav bastions.

The party is currently running a booth strengthening programme across the state, with a special focus on the seats where it had lost in 2019. Harnath Singh Yadav is the convenor for Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat, currently represented by SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav. “We are working on turning all the ‘B’ category booths in Mainpuri into ‘A’ category,” he said.

The BJP has divided polling booths into ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ categories in terms of percentage of votes the party got in the last Lok Sabha election. ‘A’ category booths are where the BJP got at least 90 per cent votes while ‘B’ category is where the party got 50-60 per cent votes.

Citing the example of Jaswant Nagar assembly, part of Mainpuri Lok Sabha, Harnath Singh Yadav said, “In 2019, for the first time we got our booth representative on all Yadav community booths barring 14 booths. In 2014, we got 25,000 votes from this assembly segment which increased to 78,000 in 2019.”

Mulayam Singh Yadav’s victory margin fell to 94,000 votes in 2019 from 364,000 votes in 2014.

“The Modi and Yogi government model is working for the poor and downtrodden without any bias and corruption. We are just identifying these people and highlighting the work done by the government,” said Yadav.