After days of speculation, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday appointed Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary, Panchayati Raj Minister in the Yogi Adityanath Cabinet, as the Uttar Pradesh State unit chief. He replaced Swatantra Dev Singh, who had resigned earlier this month.
The move to appoint Mr. Chaudhary, 54, who hails from a Jat farmer family in Mehanderi Sikandarpur village of Moradabad district of western Uttar Pradesh, is being seen as the ruling party’s effort to reach out to the Jat community which has been at the forefront of farmer protests in the sugarcane belt of the State. After Haryana and Rajasthan, he is the third Jat leader that the BJP has catapulted to the position of State president.
Mr. Chaudhary, currently a member of the Legislative Council, was the regional in-charge of the party during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and 2017 Assembly elections and worked closely with then party president Amit Shah. He is being seen as an RSS candidate who has the backing of the BJP central leadership.
East-west balance
Party sources said apart from his Jat farmer background, Mr. Chaudhary’s organisational skills and the party’s intent to strike an east-west balance in governance and organisation tilted the decision in his favour. Also, with Dharampal Saini appointed as the party general secretary (organisation), the party needed a Jat leader to balance the grassroots equation. “The Saini community has voted overwhelmingly for the party so it needs to be rewarded, but at the same time the Jats need to be wooed as well,” said a source.
The appointment, coming after Jagdeep Dhankhar’s elevation as Vice-President, is also indicative of the BJP investing in its own Jat leadership and it seems it has given up on the RLD returning to the NDA fold.
Moradabad and the adjacent Saharanpur division stood out like sore thumbs in what was otherwise a comprehensive BJP victory in the last Assembly elections. In Moradabad division, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) alliance bagged 17 out of 27 seats while in Saharanpur they won nine of 16 seats, with seven of them coming from Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, the epicentre of the Jat khaps. In several seats won by the BJP in these divisions the margin of victory was razor-thin.
Moreover, the results indicated a revival of the Jat-Muslim bonhomie that could become a headache for the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Mr. Saini hails from Bijnor which falls in Moradabad division where SP-RLD and BJP won four seats each.
Mr. Chaudhary represents those Jats who started voting as ‘Hindus’ after the Ram temple movement and has got the first mover advantage. From 2006-2017, he has worked in western U.P., first as regional secretary and then as regional president.
Organisation man
Dr. Ajit Singh, BJP member and professor at SSV College, Hapur, who has seen Mr. Chaudhary’s rise closely, described him as a leader who has found acceptance beyond his community. “After a short stint with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, he joined the BJP in 1991 when the party was not known to stand up for Jats and farmers. In 1999, he took on [SP leader] Mulayam Singh Yadav from Sambhal when not many in the party were ready to take on the force of SP,” he said.
Unlike the aggressive image of Jat leaders, said the Hapur professor, Mr. Chaudhary has a self-effacing demeanour that works well in a cadre-based party. “And behind the scenes, he is very effective.”
As a Panchayati Raj Minister (first with independent charge and then as Cabinet Minister), Mr. Chaudhary’s work was hailed for getting a record number of toilets built as part of the PM’s ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission.
However, Rajpal Balyan, head of RLD’s legislative group in the Assembly, said the election of Jagdeep Dhankhar as Vice President of India and Mr. Chaudhary now proved that “the BJP was living under the fear” of RLD and Bharatiya Kisan Union. “As Panchayati Raj Minister, he failed to control the farmers’ agitation. As the in-charge of Muzaffarnagar district, he could not stop the SP-RLD alliance from winning four out of six seats in the Assembly polls. His appointment is an acknowledgment of our effective presence at the grassroots,” said the Budhana MLA.
