As outsiders swamp party, BJP cadre in UP struggle to keep the faith

On September 1, the Bharatiya Janata Party kicked off a nationwide door-to-door membership drive. The party set the target of enrolling 10 crore members over two months.

But in Naugarh, a town in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddharth Nagar district, veteran party worker Shyam Sundar Mittal was lounging in the city market, sipping tea.

“What’s the point?” Mittal scoffed. “I’ve been part of many such drives. One has to meet hundreds of voters over many days. But then someone from another party will join and get the ticket. What’s the point of being a BJP worker for decades?”

The 66-year-old’s father was the local MLA from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – the predecessor of the BJP – in the 1970s. Mittal was the local president of the BJP till 2022. But he felt that he had been let down by his own party, which had made too many compromises on its way to political dominance.

As I travelled in Uttar Pradesh, a state where the Bharatiya Janata Party received a setback in the Lok Sabha elections, it was evident that the party is in crisis – with workers deeply unhappy with the Adityanath government.

They accused it of sidelining the organisation, and giving outsize powers to the police and bureaucrats. Workers from Bahujan communities complained of caste discrimination in the government as well as the party.

What also rankled was the central and state leadership’s policy of opening the doors of the party to outsiders and leaders from rival parties, who swiftly climbed up the organisation while leaving older, more loyal workers behind.

The turncoats

Over the last decade, the BJP in Uttar Pradesh has expanded by poaching influential leaders from its rivals – the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Adityanath’s tenure has seen major defections into the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, especially after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

This has left the cadre disillusioned.

Dharmraj Gond, a BJP functionary in Jaitpur, a small highway town 10 km outside Gorakhpur, told me that at least 25% of the BJP cadre today comprised workers who tagged along with turncoat politicians.

In Gorakhpur, the home turf of chief minister Adityanath, Devnarayan Singh was one such leader, said Gond.

Singh deserted the BSP to join the BJP in 2021. “He [Singh] enjoys so much privilege within the party here,” he added. “Politicians like him are in the party only to get insider information and pass it on to rivals. They create a culture of corruption, trading money to get work done.”

Gond, 43, has been with the party for three decades. He participated in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement as a teenager, and has a scar on his shoulder from the police assault he purportedly faced in custody then. And yet, he has only risen up to the position of the party president in the Piprauli block

“Outsiders take money from people to get their work done,” said Gond. “But us, the real Jan Sanghis, don’t do that. We are still 75% of the party.”

In Prayagraj, BJP worker Manuj Kumar Laloriya, 50, told Scroll that in 2022, BJP workers in the city were promised formal positions in the party based on their success in roping in members. “But nothing like that happened,” he said. “Outsiders paid money and got positions within the party. Whereas we are not even invited to membership drives now.”

Laloriya started out in the VHP in the 1990s and was the sector coordinator for the BJP in Prayagraj’s Allenganj neighbourhood till 2019.

He gave the example of Harshvardhan Bajpai, the BJP MLA from Allahabad North, who had switched to the party from the BSP, and whose father was a well-known Congress leader. “People like him are in the BJP because it is in power. They will be the first to desert it when the tide changes,” he said. “The era of [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee, [Lal Krishna] Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi is over.”

As a young party worker in the 1990s, Laloriya remembers taking the streets against Congress leader Rita Bahuguna Joshi. She joined the BJP in 2016 and became the Allahabad MP in 2019. “Her Congress chamchas are now in our party,” said Laloriya, outraged. “They tease the old BJP workers by flaunting selfies with Yogiji.”

But despite his grievances, Laloriya’s anger against the organisation is not greater than his loyalty. “I won’t canvass for the party before elections. I will even vote NOTA on polling day,” he said. “But I will never leave the BJP to join another party.”

Ajay Gond, a local functionary with Apna Dal (Soneylal), a BJP ally, pointed out that upper-caste or dominant caste politicians found it easy to switch allegiances. “They use money and networks to get plum positions. That’s how the BJP gets outsiders and elevates them in exchange for money,” he said. “But the old workers are not happy, and nor are the voters.”

In Ambedkar Nagar, Manoj Mishra, the district vice-president of the BJP, blamed newcomers for the party’s poor electoral performance.

Indeed, the party ended up losing the Ambedkar Nagar parliamentary seat after one such high-profile defection. In February 2024, weeks after he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi for lunch, BSP MP Ritesh Pandey switched to the BJP. He lost by nearly 1.4 lakh votes.

The Lok Sabha debacle

The dissatisfaction of party workers played a role in the Lok Sabha debacle, said party leaders.

“When the party workers don’t campaign for the party on the ground, people will not come out and vote for it,” explained Mittal, the party veteran in Naugarh, who joined the BJP in early 2000s, after spending his youth in socialist politics. “Regardless of how much you have toiled for the sangathan, and despite your hold on voters in your area, BJP workers are not heard anymore.”

Siddharth Nagar district falls in the Domariyaganj Lok Sabha constituency. The BJP managed to win the seat in the recent elections, thanks to another turncoat, Jagdambika Pal, a former Congress leader – though his margin thinned from more than 1 lakh votes in 2019 to about 43,000 this time.

“If I want to go meet the MP here, I will have to wait for four hours,” said Mittal. “Only a new crop of brokers are heard and invited to party meetings. Old, loyal workers are ignored and humiliated.”

Mittal offered an example. In 2022, when he was the city president of the BJP in Naugarh, state general secretary Anoop Kumar Gupta visited the town to take stock of things in the run-up to the state elections. “All these servile leaders spoke highly about the state of affairs in the meeting,” Mittal recalled. “I couldn’t take it. I stood up and said that we have heard the good news, maybe I can volunteer the bad news as well. The general secretary shut me down.”

Pradeep Kushwaha, a BJP worker for 19 years in Prayagraj, said that his party’s leaders seemed to be losing the common touch. “Our leaders do not show up to our homes if someone in our family passes away,” he said. “They don’t offer any financial assistance when we manage more than a dozen polling stations during elections. The voters and workers grew upset. They have slowly drifted away from the party.”

Four months after the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP in UP has not moved to soothe the resentment and anxiety brewing within its cadre. “Yogiji does an open court with voters every day. He should now do one with his karyakartas,” quipped Gond. “It’s time he listens to us, instead of just speaking at us.”

Unhappiness with central leadership

The BJP cadre in UP is not happy with Modi and Shah either. They blame the duo for messing up ticket distribution in the 2024 polls. “Candidates chosen in Delhi for eastern UP seats were not popular among the party workers here,” a district-level functionary told me at the BJP headquarters in Gorakhpur, on the condition of anonymity. “Workers wanted the tickets to change. The party had carried out surveys, and closer to the polls, we knew there were worrying reports from the ground. Everyone expected the candidates to change but they didn’t.”

Another functionary alleged that Shah did not heed Adityanath’s advice while giving away tickets in UP. “Yogiji did not have a say even in and around Gorakhpur,” said the functionary, requesting anonymity. “Shah gave away tickets to people whose loyalty he wants because he wants to be the PM.”

Mittal was candid about who he held responsible. “The lobby against Yogiji starts from the booths in UP and goes all the way up to the PMO,” he said.

He suggested that Adityanath was not viewed favourably either by the BJP cadre in the state, nor by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi.

“If things go on like this, the BJP will be wiped out in the 2027 elections,” Mittal warned.

This is the final story in a series of reports on the crisis of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh.