Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s strident Hindutva slogan, “Batenge toh katenge (Divided, we’ll be slaughtered)”, has drawn not just a sharp rebuttal from an alliance partner but also public disapproval from some within the BJP.

But bent on pushing a hard-line Hindutva in the Maharashtra polls, the BJP brass has fielded senior leaders to defend the polarising slogan and hit back at ally Ajit Pawar, who heads a splinter group of the NCP, for criticising it.

It has, however, refrained from commenting on the public disavowal of the slogan from two prominent figures within its ranks: Pankaja Munde, daughter of late BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde, and Ashok Chavan, a Congress turncoat.

Chief minister Eknath Shinde, a key BJP ally who leads a faction of the Shiv Sena, too has indirectly distanced himself from Adityanath’s slogan. He has said that development is his “only agenda” and has desisted, at his campaign meetings, from making any effort to divide voters along religious lines.

On Friday, the BJP’s Maharashtra face, deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, attacked Ajit saying he would take some time to get over his “anti-Hindu ideology” hangover.

“For decades, Ajit Pawar was with anti-Hindu ideologies.… He stayed with people for whom opposing Hindutva is secularism,” Fadnavis said. “It will take some time for him to understand the mood ofthe public.”

Ajit had last year split the NCP, led by his uncle Sharad Pawar, tied up with the BJP and joined the Mahayuti government.

For days together, Ajit has been fervently opposing Adityanath’s slogan, saying it might work in the north but not in Maharashtra.

“’Batenge toh katenge’ will not work in Maharashtra…. It may work in north India but not in the south,” Ajit has said in an interview with The Telegraph.

Fadnavis was, however, silent on Munde and Chavan.

“My politics is different. I won’t support it (the ‘Batenge’ slogan) just because I belong to the same party,” Munde, an OBC leader, recently said in an interview with The Indian Express.

“My belief is that we should work on development alone. A leader’s job is to make every living person on this land their own. Therefore, we need not bring any such topic to Maharashtra.”

Chavan, a former chief minister who had crossed over from the Congress before the general election, soon joined her. He said the slogan was not in good taste, was irrelevant and that the people of Maharashtra would not appreciate it.

The senior BJP leadership has, however, pulled out the stops in pitching a strident Hindutva line in the Maharashtra campaign, a strategy that many think betrays desperation.

Addressing a rally here on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the Maharashtra elections were a fight between “patriots” and the “followers of Aurangzeb”.

The BJP’s hard-line campaign is believed to reflect a strategy formulated jointly by the BJP and the RSS to try and counter the Opposition’s allegation that the saffron party poses a threat to the Constitution, and its call for a nationwide caste census to rationalise reservation quotas.

BJP managers believe that the “threat to the Constitution” narrative stymied the party in the Lok Sabha polls and that it needs to be blunted with the Hindutva hammer to avoid a repeat in the Assembly polls.

Fadnavis had taken the first step, repeatedly claiming that “vote jihad” was a factor behind the party’s sub-par showing in the Lok Sabha polls. Adityanath followed with his “Batenge” slogan when he campaigned in the state.

Modi tossed up a slightly refined version of the same slogan, “Ek hain toh safe hain (United, we’ll be safe)”, which the allies feel is more tolerable than Adityanath’s brazen coinage.

The BJP leadership has come out in force to endorse Adityanath’s line. “When Yogi says, ‘Batenge toh katenge’, he is reminding us of history,” Fadnavis told ANI on Friday.

“This land belongs to our ancestors, like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and not to Razakars.”

“Razakars” is a reference to a militia that opposed Hyderabad’s accession to India and is accused of atrocities on ordinary people.

The BJP also fielded Nitin Gadkari, Union transport minister and one of Maharashtra’s tallest politicians, to defend Adityanth.

“We should not interpret a different meaning of ‘Batenge toh katenge’ and rather stand united against terrorism and enemies of the country,” Gadkari told ANI, stressing that people of all religions are Indians.

Cadre scepticism

In the rural heartland of Pune and Satara, western Maharashtra, even some BJP cadres acknowledged that “Batenge toh katenge” will not work in Maharashtra.

“Here Hindus and Muslims live together in harmony. The ‘Batenge toh katenge’ slogan has no impact here,” said Devendra Ghorpade, a BJP worker in Ramkrishanagar village, Satara district.

The village has a temple and a mosque just 100 metres apart.

“The Ladki Bahin scheme will help us win, not Hindu-Muslim,” Ghorpade said.