Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has assigned three ministers to each of the 10 Assembly seats where by-elections will be held in the coming months, faced with criticism from within the BJP over the Lok Sabha poll setback in the state and the allegation that bureaucrats were giving the short shrift to party leaders and workers.

Adityanath took the decision two days after facing massive criticism from deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya and other BJP leaders, who were of the view that the party could win only 33 of the 80 parliamentary seats in the state because of the curt treatment of government officers towards them. The BJP had won 62 seats in 2019.

“Your and my pain is the same…. But the organisation is always bigger than the government,” Maurya was quoted as saying in a meeting of the BJP state working committee in the presence of BJP national president J.P. Nadda in Lucknow on Monday. The deputy CM had also met Nadda in New Delhi on Tuesday.

Trying to send a message to party leaders that he was serious about the by-elections, Adityanath called his ministers on Wednesday to seek their feedback on the political dynamics in the 10 vacant seats for which the Election Commission could announce the dates soon.

“We discussed the situation in the 10 Assembly seats where elections are due. We planned to contest and win all the seats,” said Swatantra Dev Singh, the Jal Shakti minister in the Adityanath cabinet.

Sources in the BJP said the CM had asked the 30 ministers to start campaigning and monitor electioneering.

A senior BJP leader said: “Since massive activities are going on in the state, the central BJP and also within the government against Adityanath, he seems to have decided to show that he is looking forward rather than indulging in a blame game.

“Surprisingly, the two deputy CMs (Maurya and Brajesh Pathak) didn’t attend the meeting. Maurya and Pathak had stopped attending meetings of the CM soon after the parliamentary election results,” he said.

The BJP leader added that while Maurya is being “pampered” by some senior BJP leaders at the Centre, Pathak has the support of a section of Brahmin leaders who believe that only Kshatriyas have been promoted by the Adityanath government.

Samajwadi Party general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav has claimed that some BJP leaders have complained to their seniors that a section of state leaders had heavily banked on government officers but didn’t get the expected response during the Lok Sabha elections. “It is clear now that they wanted the help of the officers to win the elections. However, we believe that they won whatever they won because of the officers, who didn’t let our voters reach the polling booths,” Yadav said.