As outsiders swamp party, BJP cadre in UP struggle to keep the faith
The party has expanded by opening doors to influential leaders from Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. This has left older workers disillusioned.
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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...
