 "BJP announces six faces for UP election campaign")
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will not have a chief ministerial face for Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, at least not yet. Instead, it will have six prominent leaders to do much of the campaigning. These include Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party President Amit Shah and four prominent state leaders who represent what the BJP believes to be its support among upper castes and Other Backward Castes (OBCs). The list does not have a single Dalit leader.
These leaders will lead the BJP's nearly two months long four 'Parivartan Yatras', which will start from various corners of the state from November 5. The other four leaders are union ministers Rajnath Singh, Kalraj Mishra, Uma Bharti and UP state unit president Keshav Prasad Maurya.
The strategy is to consolidate BJP's upper caste and non-Yadav OBC support base. The Home Minister is a Thakur, a community that comprises eight per cent of the electorate. Mishra is a Brahmin, a community that constitutes 10 to 12 per cent of the electorate, while Bharti and Maruya are non-Yadav OBC leaders and represent approximately 10 per cent of the electorate. Recent assembly polls in the state have seen any party reaching 28 to 30 per cent vote share in a multi-cornered fight reaching the majority mark in the 403-member assembly.
Prime Minister Modi will address six public rallies. Shah, Singh and Mishra will address 10 rallies each and Bharti will address six rallies. The four yatras will converge in Lucknow on December 24 after traversing over 17,000 km, senior BJP leader and union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said. The yatras will start from four different regions of the state.
"People's participation and development will be central themes of the yatras," Prasad said. BJP allies Ram Vilas Paswan and Ramdas Athawale, two Dalit faces of the National Democratic Alliance, and Upendra Kushwaha, an OBC leader from Bihar, will also be joining the yatras.
Prasad also gave the slogan 'poorna bahumat, sampoorna vikas; Bhajapa per hai vishwas' (full majority, complete development; we have faith in BJP). The party will focus on the lawlessness "wrought by 15 years of Bahujan Samaj Party-Samajwadi Party governments in the state".
The last BJP government in UP was in 2002. The party won 71 of the 80 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
All of BJP's other prominent rivals - the Congress, SP and BSP - have chief ministerial faces in UP. The BJP hadn't announced chief ministerial faces for Jharkhand, Haryana, Bihar and Maharashtra assembly polls. It had won Jharkhand, Haryana and Maharashtra but lost in Bihar.
