BJP leader Uma Bharti has said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath should not be blamed for the party's poor performance in Uttar Pradesh in the Lok Sabha elections.
The party had fared badly in the state even after the demolition of the Babri masjid, the former Union minister said in Madhya Pradesh's Shivpuri district on Saturday.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won only 33 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 parliamentary elections.
"It is not right to blame Modi and Yogi for the Lok Sabha election results in Uttar Pradesh. BJP had lost even after the demolition of the Babri structure on December 6, 1992. Despite this, we did not drop the Ram temple in Ayodhya from our agenda....We never associated Ayodhya with votes. Similarly, now we are not associating (disputes regarding religious places at) Mathura-Kashi with votes," Bharti said replying to a reporter's question.
To another question, she said one needs to understand the nature of the Hindu community which does not conflate the social system with religion.
"It is the Islamic society which works by uniting the social and religious systems. That is why they vote according to the social system," the BJP leader claimed.
The results in Uttar Pradesh did not mean people's devotion for Lord Ram had dwindled, Bharti further said.
"We should not have this arrogance that every Ram devotee will vote for the BJP. We should not think that the one who does not vote for us is not a Ram devotee. This (poll result) is the outcome of some negligence and nothing else," she said.
The BJP leader also said running a coalition government at the Centre with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu would not be difficult as in the past the BJP ran governments successfully with them as allies.
Earlier on Saturday, Bharti met local BJP leaders in Shivpuri on her way to Bhopal from Gwalior.
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