Going into the Uttar Pradesh assmebly polls scheduled for early 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as it meets for its national executive in Allahabad over the next two days, is beset with a confusion it's come to know well after the assembly poll defeats in Delhi and Bihar - who would be its chief ministerial candidate and whether at all to announce one.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who was the UP CM from 2000 to 2002, has turned down the suggestion from the party leadership that he should accept the mantle. His refusal has helped launch the ambitions of several aspirants. None of these measure up to the appeal of even incumbent CM Akhilesh Yadav, let alone state heavyweights like Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati and her Samajwadi Party counterpart Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Visitors to Allahabad, if they are unaware of the internal mechanics of the BJP, would be led to believe, by the evidence of the posters and hoardings that dot the roads around the city's airport and railways station that the party's Sultanpur Member of Parliament Varun Gandhi was likely to be his party's chief ministerial candidate for the UP polls of 2017.
Most hoardings feature Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah on one side and Varun Gandhi on the other. Several others have Modi and Shah along with recently appointed party unit chief and Phulpur MP Keshav Prasad Maurya.
Apart from Maurya, Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, Noida MP and Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani are also being talked of as possible candidates. Although, there aren't any hoardings of any of these three on Allahabad's roads.
Party seniors point out that all the talk related to any of these worthies is primarily by their supporters. Each of these have have their positives. Varun Gandhi may not be a bad choice if Congress fields Priyanka Gandhi as its chief campaigner in UP and will be acceptable to the upper castes.
Maurya is a non-Yadav OBC that the BJP is trying reach out to, while Adityanath is a Thakur with a strong Hindutva image. Irani had proved her credentials by giving Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi a tough fight in his pocket borough Amethi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Maurya is a non-Yadav OBC that the BJP is trying reach out to, while Adityanath is a Thakur with a strong Hindutva image. Irani had proved her credentials by giving Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi a tough fight in his pocket borough Amethi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
In the last two years, the BJP has faced defeats whenever not faced with Congress as its principal adversary and when its opponents had a credible and popular chief ministerial face. This was true in Delhi as well as Bihar. In Delhi, BJP announced Kiran Bedi's name too late. In any case, she couldn't dent Arvind Kejriwal's popularity. In Bihar, BJP went into the polls with Modi's face. Its decision was spurred more by fears of infighting since it had one too many competing chief ministerial aspirants.
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The BJP is staring at a similar dilemma that could meet a denouement similar to Delhi and Bihar. Shah, buoyed by the victory in Assam, has the opportunity to take a risk in Uttar Pradesh by projecting a CM candidate that might not win this time but could serve the party well in the years to come.
But then UP sends 80 Lok Sabha seats and is known to have sent several PMs, from Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Chaudhary Charan Singh, Rajiv Gandhi, VP Singh, Chandra Shekhar and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This was a reason why Modi also contested from Varanasi. A popular leader in UP has the potential to become an alternative power centre in the BJP.