A Ram temple opening. The coddling of sadhus. An exhortation to Hindu voters. Visits by BJP heavyweights. It’s election time in Ayodhya again.

Except that this is not the seat of the grand temple itself but a small town 40km away in the same district.

A little-known rural constituency in Ayodhya town’s backyard has suddenly set up a prestige battle for the BJP, keen to recover face after, in chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s words, being “ridiculed across the world for losing from Ayodhya” in the general election.

Milkipur is one of 10 Assembly constituencies in Uttar Pradesh where by-elections are due. The Election Commission is yet to announce the dates but the BJP launched its campaign there more than a month ago, pushing heavyweights into the effort, although it’s yet to stir on the other nine seats.

A half-dozen state BJP ministers, including Milkipur poll minder and agriculture minister Surya Pratap Shahi, and over a dozen state-level leaders participated in a door-to-door campaign in the constituency on Sunday.

Their refrain: “Milkipur is as important to us as Ayodhya.”

Adityanath, who was in the constituency from Thursday to Saturday, met sadhus and local BJP leaders to extract assurances that they wouldn’t let the Samajwadi Party win Milkipur again.

On Thursday, the chief minister asked the sadhus whether they had liked it when “the entire country was ridiculing the BJP for its defeat from Ayodhya”.

“The BJP is being ridiculed across the world for losing from Ayodhya,” he had added.

On Saturday, Adityanath inaugurated a Ram temple at the Ayodhya Vidyapeeth in Milkipur and unveiled the statues of two sadhus, Madhusudanacharya and Ramanujacharya.

He told a public meeting: “Milkipur is not separate from Ayodhya; Milkipur will be affected if Ayodhya suffers.”

The BJP lost the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat (which includes Ayodhya) in last summer’s general election, with party incumbent Lallu Singh defeated by Samajwadi candidate Awadhesh Prasad by over 50,000 votes. The SP led from Milkipur by 8,000.

What enhances the Milkipur by-election’s symbolism for the BJP is that it was held by Awadhesh and fell vacant when he shifted to Parliament. Its speculated that the SP might field Awadhesh’s son Ajit Prasad in the by-election.

But Milkipur — a poor, backward constituency with large OBC and Dalit populations — has gone to the BJP only twice: in 1991 during the peak of the Ram temple agitation and in 2017, when it rode Modi’s charisma.

The defeat in Faizabad rankles with the BJP not just because of the humiliation of losing from its political cradle, but also because it’s here that the script for the party’s national setback was partly written.

During the Lok Sabha campaign, Lallu was quoted as saying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was gunning for 400-plus seats so he could change the Constitution.

The Opposition used this to claim a new Modi government would abolish reservations, a campaign that is believed to have cut the BJP’s nationwide seat tally to 240 from the 303 it had won in 2019.

“The BJP wants to win from Milkipur anyhow and claim that its defeat from the Ayodhya (Faizabad) Lok Sabha seat was a one-off, caused by the Opposition’s disinformation campaign,” a political observer in Ayodhya said.

“Winning Milkipur will also be an opportunity for Adityanath to silence his detractors, including deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya.”

Maurya has indirectly blamed Adityanath’s alleged empowering of officials over party functionaries for the BJP’s debacle from Uttar Pradesh, where it won just 33 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats compared with 62 in 2019.

At Thursday’s public meeting, the chief minister fell back on the tried and tested. He urged Hindus to learn a lesson from Bangladesh and get united.

“Opposition parties have sealed their lips on (the attacks on minorities in) Bangladesh but it’s our responsibility to protect the Hindus there,” he said.

BJP sources said that at a closed-door meeting with district-level BJP leaders on Saturday, Adityanath said: “BJP agents failed to turn up on polling day at about 300 booths in the state in the general election; don’t let this happen in Milkipur.”

Sources said many sadhus had complained to Adityanath that his ministers and officials “didn’t listen” to them and that was why they had stopped “publicising the BJP” before the general election.