LUCKNOW: Buoyed by the resounding victory in the 2022 Assembly polls which came through by a significant and overwhelming support of the weaker sections of society including the Scheduled Castes, the ruling BJP is out to give a robust push
to its outreach agenda to win over the SCs further, especially in the run-up to Mission 2024.
As per highly-placed sources, the ruling BJP has asked Union and state ministers, MPs and MLAs to attend events related to Dr BR Ambedkar on the occasion of Ambedkar Jayanti on Thursday across the state to take the “mission of Baba Saheb” forward. Moreover, the party has also directed its lawmakers to pay tribute to other Dalit icons on the occasion as well.
It may be recalled that the BJP has been consolidating the SC vote in its favour since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when Narendra Modi was introduced as the party’s PM face. Till then the party was known more an organization of upper castes. After 2014, the BJP succeeded in washing off that tag by winning over the overwhelming support of a number of non-Jatav SCs as Jatavs are considered to be the trusted votebank of Mayawati’s BSP.
In the 2017 UP assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, SCs further gravitated to the BJP which led to a gradual and consistent rise in its vote share. In the 2022 Assembly elections, with the BSP running a comparatively low key campaign, the BJP even succeeded in clinching a respectable chunk of Jatav votes giving a major dent to the BSP, the vote share of which came down to 12.88 per cent from 22.23 per cent of 2017.
In the 2022 Assembly elections, around 34 per cent of the Jatavs who make the highest 56 per cent of the total 20-21 per cent of SC population in UP voted for the BJP. Similarly, around 45 per cent non-Jatavs supported the saffron brigade in the recently concluded assembly polls. In fact, the party had been eying Jatav votes right from the beginning. However, it gave a boost to its agenda by fielding some prominent Jatav faces like Baby Rani Maurya and former Kanpur police commissioner Asim Arun in the 2022 assembly election.
The BJP is still making all-out efforts to woo the SCs, especially, at a time when the SC leadership in the state is fighting a crucial battle of survival.
On Thursday, while CM Yogi Adityanath will attend an event at Ambedkar Mahasabha in Lucknow, Union Minister of State for Urban Development Kaushal Kishore will attend a seminar on ‘the role of BJP and RSS in taking Ambedkar’s mission forward’, organised by Parakh Mahasangh, which he heads.
The party’s state vice-president Vijay Bahadur Pathak said the discussions would be around Ambedkar’s ideology and the places he was associated with him.
Meanwhile, UP minister of state (independent charge) Kapil Dev Agrawal had written a letter to CM Yogi urging him to rename at least four engineering colleges after Ambedkar to pay tribute to him.
In the letter, Aggrawal had urged the Chief Minister to restore the names of two engineering colleges in Banda and Bijnore districts after Dr BR Ambedkar. He also urged him to rename two other engineering colleges in Azamgarh and Ambedkarnagar after Dr Ambedkar on his birth anniversary. Notably, the four engineering colleges were established between 2010-2011 during the rule of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati.
Sources in the technical education department said that the four colleges were established under a ‘special component plan’ launched by the Centre for uplift of weaker sections of the society.
While the two colleges in Banda and Bijnore were called Bhim Rao Ambedkar Engineering College of Information Technology, the ones in Azamgarh and Ambedkarnagar were named after BSP founder Kanshi Ram — Manyavar Kanshi Ram Engineering College of Information and Technology. However, the names of the four colleges were changed to Rajkiya Engineering College (State Engineering College) in 2015 by the Akhilesh Yadav government.