Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who earned the sobriquet of “Bulldozer Baba” for unleashing the mechanised marauder on the houses of “offenders”, has found himself nearly getting bulldozed by a section in the BJP.

In an apparently coordinated attack, a group of OBC leaders in and outside the BJP has begun targeting the Hindutva icon amid indications that they are being egged on by the Delhi leadership, which is peeved by the party’s dismal Lok Sabha poll show in the sprawling heartland state.

The pattern of the attack has lent heft to the pre-Lok Sabha poll swirl in the corridors of power that the Delhi leadership was planning to get rid of Adityanath as chief minister. Adityanath is perceived as a roadblock in the path of home minister Amit Shah emerging as the undisputed successor of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the BJP.

The “attack and oust Yogi” project spilt out in the open last Sunday when Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, a prominent OBC face of the BJP, stressed the supremacy of the “party” over the “government”.

“Sangathan sarkar se bada hai (The party organisation is bigger than the government),” Maurya had said at the state working committee meeting of the BJP amid loud applause from party leaders.

“Sangathan sarkar se bada hai, bada tha, bada rahega (The party organisation was, is and will always be bigger than the government),” Maurya had stressed.

Maurya was seen to be fuelling accusations of BJP workers getting sidelined by Adityanath’s “iron-grip” style of governing the state through a set of loyal bureaucrats and police officers.

The anti-Adityanath camp, led by Maurya, has been telling the Delhi leadership that the “primary reason” for the BJP’s loss of Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh was the “anger” among party cadres and desertion by non-Yadav backward castes. “Your (workers’) pain is my pain,” Maurya had said, emphasising that his doors were always open for party workers.

The BJP could win just 33 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state compared with 62 that the party had bagged in 2019 despite the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party forming a formidable alliance. NDA allies RLD and Apna Dal won two and one seats, respectively, this time. The SP-Congress alliance won 43 seats.

At the BJP meeting in Lucknow, Adityanath had sought to blame “over-confidence” as the main reason behind the party’s lacklustre show, obliquely seeking to blame the Delhi leadership for fielding “unpopular candidates” while hailing the achievements of his government on the law-and-order front.

Maurya is learnt to have carried the “oust-Yogi” drive to Delhi when he held a nearly two-hour meeting with BJP president J.P. Nadda on Tuesday along with state
party chief Bhupendra Chaudhary. “The more we delay (in replacing Adityanath as chief minister), the more the party suffers,” Maurya was quoted by sources as having said to Nadda.

On Wednesday, Chaudhary met Modi. This was followed by Shah driving to Modi’s residence and staying there for nearly two hours.

Party insiders said “organisational changes” could take place in Uttar Pradesh after the by-elections in 10 seats.

Before Maurya, NDA partner Apna Dal (Soneylal) leader and junior minister in the Modi government, Anupriya Patel, had written to Adityanath about reserved seats becoming “unreserved” in state government recruitments.

Patel, whose party draws strength from the OBC Patel or Kurmi community, was seen to be blaming Adityanath, an upper caste Kshatriya/Thakur, for large sections of non-Yadav backwards voting against the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls.

In her letter, Patel said she had been repeatedly getting complaints that in state government recruitments involving only interviews for selection, the reserved seats were being declared “unreserved” on the ground that SC, ST and OBC candidates were being “found unsuitable”. She said this practice was leading to “anger” among the deprived sections and it should be stopped “immediately”.

The BJP insiders claimed that Patel’s otherwise routine letter was “leaked” to the media to prepare the ground for taking on Adityanath.

As the Adityanath camp was seething over Maurya’s attack, Sanjay Nishad, another OBC leader and the head of BJP ally NISHAD party, identified the “misuse of the bulldozer against the poor” as a reason for the NDA’s poll setback in the state.

“If you uproot the poor, they will uproot us from politics,” Nishad, who is also a minister in the Adityanath government, said, citing the instance of a poor woman’s house being bulldozed after she lodged a complaint against the local panchayat head.

Nishad said “officer-shahi” under Adityanath was a major reason for the loss of seats.

The synchronised attack by the OBC leaders is being viewed by the Adityanath camp as a deliberate attempt to blame the “popular chief minister” for the party’s loss of Lok Sabha seats and use it as an excuse to “replace him with an OBC face”.

“We had feared this and it has started,” a BJP leader close to Adityanath said, recalling what AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal had said during the Lok Sabha polls.

Delhi chief minister Kejriwal had in May claimed that Shah would become Prime Minister next year and Adityanath would be replaced before that, stressing that a bitter succession war was going on in the BJP.