There is acknowledgement this time, it is the party's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, who is drawing votes for the BJP. "If it had been anyone else, half the candidates they had put up in UP would have lost. Murli Manohar Joshi would have certainly lost by a margin of at least 100,000 votes," says Manoj Shrivastava, a Varanasi-based reporter from Hindi daily Amar Ujala.
Modi's appeal is here and now. But how will the party recast itself to stay in the political game till the next Assembly elections, due in 2017, when it will have to face regionally strong groupings such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party?
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The party is seeing a change of leaders. Suresh Rana, member of the Legislative Assembly from Thana Bhawan in Muzaffarnagar, had thought he might be able to contest for Parliament. This was before he was called by party general-secretary Amit Shah and told: "You are not getting a Lok Sabha nomination. But if you work hard and put all your energies into getting the BJP to win in the 2014 elections, there could be something big in store for you". Rana was convinced he would be given a party post that would eventually help him become the BJP chief in UP.
After L K Advani's Rath Yatra led to the biggest consolidation the party saw in the state, the other backward classes (OBC) base was the BJP's mainstay. In caste terms, the largest complement of BJP MPs from UP in the 90s, both in the Assembly and the Lok Sabha, was from the OBC community, then led by Kalyan Singh, a Lodh.
Now, Uma Bharati has taken on the mantle. Other OBC leaders have to be identified and promoted so that they can challenge Mulayam Singh Yadav. That process is underway. The BJP's alliance with Soneram Patel's Apna Dal, the support to his daughter Anupriya and Narendra Modi's speech in rural Varanasi, which has a predominantly Kurmi population, suggest the BJP is making a determined effort to break the seemingly homogeneous OBC base of the Samajwadi Party and target a caste that is as prosperous as the Yadavs, but at a disadvantage when it comes to cornering quotas. Accounting for nine per cent of Uttar Pradesh's population, the Kurmis comprise just 24 per cent of the state's OBCs. The Yadavs, however, comprise 15 per cent of the state's population and 40 per cent of its OBC population. This, for the Kurmis, is a matter of great discontent.
In promoting a new state-level leadership, the BJP does not want to overlook its bread-and-butter base, the Brahmins. But the party is conscious this cannot be done until the party's most important leader from UP, Rajnath Singh, is neutralised. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Brahmin-Thakur tension in the state is considered enough to spoil the party's chances in half a dozen seats. A local BJP leader said the first thing Narendra Modi would do after coming to power was order the political murder of Rajnath Singh, as this would bring to the BJP and Modi at least half a dozen other leaders.
A young BJP leader from the state is Varun Gandhi. Few noticed when Modi reached Amethi to campaign for Smriti Irani, Maneka Gandhi was by his side at the helipad. Though there is no love lost between Varun Gandhi and Narendra Modi, Maneka's ambitions for her son are as fierce as Sonia's are for her son Rahul Gandhi. And, Varun is intelligent, understands caste and shares the Gandhi surname.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP can make something of the 2014 victory only if it undertakes a thorough shake-up of the party structure here. The situation is grim - one generation is dying, but the second doesn't seem to be ready yet.