‘The caste order has not changed’: Anger among BJP’s Bahujan cadre in UP

Amit Prajapati stood at the entrance of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s district headquarters in Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh, working with electricians to get some bulbs fixed.

In the air conditioned rooms inside, sat the president, vice-president and the media in-charge of the party’s Ambedkar Nagar district unit – all Brahmins.

The BJP has tried to shed its image as the party of upper-caste Hindus by wooing marginalised groups like the Prajapatis, a community of traditional potters, officially categorised as Other Backward Classes, but seen as ati pichada, or extremely backward. In recent years, there has been a growing assertion among the extremely backward castes, who feel left behind by dominant OBCs like the Yadavs and Kurmis. EBCs constitute about 30% of all voters in Ambedkar Nagar, said a senior party leader.

Prajapati joined the Bharatiya Janata Party six years ago. The 24-year-old likes to point out that a worker from his caste is now mandal president of the BJP in one of the blocks in the district.

But despite such accommodation, Prajapati told me that several voters from his community did not vote for the BJP in the 2024 general elections.

The reason, he added, was unemployment and price rise. “In my village, no one from my community has a government job,” he said. What about others, I asked. “In the last year or two, one person got a job in the income tax department, a second in the Border Security Force, and another in the Special Protection Group.” Prajapati pointed out that all the three men were Kurmis, a dominant landowning caste listed as an OBC in UP.

“The caste order has not changed in the villages here,” he said, adding that his community sensed that it was being discriminated against under the Adityanath government.

This sentiment cuts across eastern UP, and applies not just to government jobs, but also to plum positions within the party. Although most acute within EBC and Dalit groups, the sentiment extends to even non-Yadav dominant OBCs.

In Prayagraj, 160 km from Ambedkar Nagar, Pradeep Kushwaha, 45, who has been in the BJP for 19 years, told Scroll that under the Adityanath government, functionaries from OBC and Dalit castes in his region only rose up to positions at the block level, whereas Brahmins and Thakurs were promoted to city- and district-level designations.

“There is rampant casteism in the upper echelons of the party,” said Kushwaha, who hails from the Maurya caste, a dominant OBC caste in the region.

A party for the upper-castes?

The BJP’s remarkable electoral success in Uttar Pradesh in the last decade has been driven by its ability to forge a coalition of non-Yadav backward caste groups, non-Jatav Dalits and its traditional supporters among the upper-castes.

While Yadavs are believed to be traditional voters of the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party counts the Jatav community among its most loyal supporters.

Seven years later, however, the BJP’s debacle in the 2024 polls – where it lost 30 seats – was mostly driven by the cracks in this social coalition under Adityanath’s watch, especially with the drifting away of UP’s OBC and Dalit voters, according to post-poll surveys by CSDS-Lokniti.

Not surprisingly, Keshav Prasad Maurya, the deputy chief minister and an important backward caste leader, has emerged as one of Adityanath’s foremost challengers.

In the run-up to the 2017 state elections, Maurya was tasked with bringing in the state’s backward caste vote to the BJP. After the party swept those polls, Maurya expected the chief minister’s post, but had to settle for a supporting role to an upper-caste Adityanath.

In July this year, he remarked that “the organisation is bigger than the government”, a criticism of the alleged subordination of the party and its workers in the Adityanath regime.

“The workers are the pride…the doors of my residence at 7 Kalidas Marg are open to everyone. I am deputy chief minister later but first I am a worker,” said Maurya, who spent his youth in the Sangh Parivar and then moved to the BJP.

Maurya’s push against Adityanath might not just be fuelled by an upset cadre, but also by his keenness to speak on behalf of the disillusioned backward caste and Dalit voters who are swinging away from the party.

Kushwaha told Scroll that Maurya not becoming the CM after the 2017 polls “had caused pain in the OBC community”. He added: “His contribution to the party is very important. He should share the CM’s tenure with Yogiji.”

This sentiment also exists among voters of the community. Meva Lal Maurya, 62, a resident of Basmahua village in Phulpur, which elected Maurya as MP in 2014, preferred him as the state’s chief minister. “The BJP made Adityanath the chief minister, and not Maurya, because he is a Thakur,” he said. “This shows the casteism within the party.” In the Lok Sabha election, Meva Lal Maurya decided to switch sides and vote for the Opposition INDIA alliance.

In Jaitpur in Gorakhpur district, Dharmraj Gond, the BJP mandal president of the Piprauli block, echoed similar anxieties. “Dalit voters feel that they vote for the BJP and help it form a government but it is the upper castes that get the tickets,” said Gond, who has been with the BJP for 30 years. His community is spread across northern and central India. In most states, it is counted among the Scheduled Tribes, but in UP, barring a few districts like Gorakhpur, it is included in the Scheduled Castes.

In the five Lok Sabha seats in Gond’s Gorakhpur division, three tickets went to Brahmins and one to a Kurmi in the recent Lok Sabha polls. Only the reserved Bansgaon seat had a Dalit candidate. Gond went on: “The EBC castes here complain that they don’t get government facilities like the Ayushman Bharat cards as easily as other groups.” He was referring to the central government health insurance scheme for the bottom 40% of the Indian population.

Nevertheless, despite the perceived upper-caste – and specifically Thakur – bias of the Adityanath government, Keshav Prasad Maurya does not appear to have the confidence of the BJP cadre beyond his backyard of Prayagraj.

Some of it has to do with the BJP’s unease as it balances Hindutva with caste engineering.

In Gorakhpur, Anurag Majhwar, the vice president of the saffron party’s Scheduled Caste morcha in UP, disapproved of the deputy chief minister’s potshots at Adityanath, accusing him of using “caste politics” to get an edge over his competitor, a symbolic blow to Hindu unity.

Majhwar acknowledged that BJP workers remain unheard by the government, and that voters from his community do not approach them with their problems for this reason. “But no party has done more for the Dalits than the BJP,” said Majhwar, a Dalit himself. “Every government has a corruption problem, be it the SP government or the BJP government. We are trying to curb this corruption.”

What voters say

The anger of the extremely backward classes and Dalit voters towards the Adityanath government is fuelled by their relative lack of access to state resources – chiefly government jobs – as compared to the dominant backward castes and upper castes.

At a tea shop just outside Udvalia Parsa village in Siddharth Nagar, Lal Bihari Sharma, 55, a hairdresser from the Nai caste, told me that he had voted for the BJP in every election since 2019.

His community, classified as EBC, has mostly sided with the party. “But today I have grown old, and yet I struggle to find work and survive,” rued Sharma. “If things don’t become better, I will vote for the opposition in 2027.”

Sharma’s real worry was not for himself, but his daughters. One of them had a bachelor’s degree in political science, but was working as a cook in a government school. Another had studied engineering but had not secured a job.

A Brahmin from Sharma’s village, who was at the tea shop and had also voted for the BJP, egged him on to accept that the problem was not unemployment, but that the educated youth, like his daughters, were not skilled enough.

Sharma, keen to not upset his neighbour, chose his words carefully. “Under this government, people who have means and social standing can get ahead,” he said. “But those who don’t, do not get far.”

It is hard to miss this sentiment in Ambedkar Nagar too, including the Katehari Assembly constituency, which is due for a bye-poll this year.

In the Chamar basti of the Kurmidiha village, resident Sita Devi said that the government wants “SCs and BCs to fall into a ditch”. “The general caste kids study in convent schools. They go to Delhi and Mumbai,” she said. “Whereas our children go to government schools where there is no education.”

Her son, Irosh Kumar, pointed out that even the fruits of development only reached the dominant castes of his village. “The roads are paved all the way to the homes of Pandits, Thakurs and Kurmis,” he said. “But in our parts, the Kurmi pradhan dug up the road to only make things worse.”

The Nishad vote

Even though the Dalit and EBC anger against the Adityanath government is palpable, a Samajwadi Party win in the Katehari bye-polls here is not a foregone conclusion.

Irosh Kumar told me that most of the Chamar residents of Kurmidiha – a Kurmi dominant village – voted for Lalji Verma, the Samajwadi Party’s candidate for the Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha seat in the national election, “for the sake of the Constitution”. The Opposition campaign in several states alleged that the BJP was asking for a massive mandate of 400 seats in order to change the Constitution, which stoked fears that the Modi government might end reservation in government jobs and educational institutions.

The Kurmi leader won the election by more than 1.3 lakh votes.

For the bye-polls, the party has given a ticket to Verma’s wife, Shobhawati.

But this time around, Kumar said, they might change their mind.

The reason, once again, is caste. The Chamar residents in Kurmidiha see their Kurmi neighbours as prejudiced, seizing panchayat funds for their own interests, at the expense of the rest. A Kurmi MLA, over a Kurmi MP, is unlikely to make things better.

For many Dalit and EBC voters in Uttar Pradesh, the need to counter the hegemony of the local dominant backward caste in their area, whether Yadav or Kurmi, trumps other political goals.

In nearby Madangarh village, a tea-seller from the Kahar community, an EBC caste, told me – in the presence of dominant caste customers – that he voted for the Samajwadi Party in the recent polls. But as soon as the customers left, he confessed that he had in fact voted for the BJP. He had lied for self-preservation.

The tea-seller said that a couple of weeks ago, when Adityanath had held a rally in Katehari, he had planted a small saffron flag at his shop. “The next day, Yadav and Kurmi goondas of the SP came and set fire to the shop,” said the man, who chose to be anonymous out of fear. “My house was also attacked and the losses run into Rs 50,000-Rs 60,000.”

The tea-seller went to the police and filed an FIR, but he has no faith in a fair investigation. “Those men will interfere and prevent justice,” he said.

The BJP’s bye-poll pick for Katehari, Dharmraj Nishad, appeared to be popular with voters across castes.

Nishad is liked because he is purportedly amenable to voters and their problems. He is also from an EBC caste of traditional boatmen, present in significant numbers in eastern UP, and targeted by the Nishad Party, which has been in alliance with the BJP since 2019.

But the patience of the Nishad community is also running out. At the headquarters of the Nishad Party in Gorakhpur, district president Santosh Nishad whipped out his phone and opened the screenshot of an old news article. It reported a speech by Adityanath before he had become chief minister, where he said that he would fight for Scheduled Caste status for Nishads “sadan se sadak tak”, from the Assembly to the street.

The SC status has been a long standing demand of the Nishad community, which includes more than a dozen sub-castes. Santosh pointed out that Nishads were listed as SCs in Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Delhi. Although the BJP has repeatedly promised SC status to the community in Uttar Pradesh, it has hesitated to act since such a move will upset its Dalit voters, who will view it as the Nishads eating into their share.

In its second term in government, the BJP is finding it hard to balance the many competing promises it made to the marginal castes. As a result, its own allies now openly accuse it of upper-caste bias.

As an example, Santosh cited the 10% quota for the ‘economically weaker sections’ in the general category, implemented by the Modi government in 2019. “They [BJP] created the biggest advantage for the already advantaged, giving quota to people who have land, homes and cars,” he said. “But most people in my community are unemployed, and they can’t even get SC status under their own government.”

“The SC status is a dealbreaker,” Santosh added. “If the Nishads are not given that status, then the BJP will not form a government in the state in 2027.”