The road to the throne in Delhi, or so goes the adage, passes through Uttar Pradesh. It is thus not surprising that when UP, idiomatically speaking, sneezes, Delhi catches a cold. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s poor electoral kitty in UP — it won 33 out of the 80 seats — in the general election had thus unnerved the BJP’s central leadership. But now, there are whispers that the knives are out for the UP chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, in an orchestrated script that seems to have New Delhi’s nod. The deputy chief minister, Keshav Prasad Maurya, blew the war bugle, so to speak, by suggesting that the election results reflected the anger of the BJP’s personnel who had been sidelined by the unilateral functioning of the chief minister. Other fronts have been opened simultaneously. Anupriya Patel, an ally of the National Democratic Alliance as well as a junior minister in Narendra Modi’s government, has blamed Mr Adityanath — he is a Kshatriya — for the non-Yadav, backward communities shunning the BJP in the polls, while Sanjay Nishad has been critical of Mr Adityanath for his decision to unleash the bulldozers against the poor. That the game is afoot is also evident from Mr Adityanath’s response: the chief minister had obliquely blamed the BJP’s central leadership for its selection of unpopular candidates in the crucial state.

The real issue behind these political parleys is perhaps personal rivalry: the word is that Mr Adityanath’s claim to succeed Mr Modi is resented by the Union home minister, Amit Shah. The shadow of these fractious exchanges — the Congress is not the only party to be afflicted by factionalism — could well fall on the approaching by-elections to 10 assembly seats in UP. These polls are being seen as a litmus test for Mr Adityanath. But the goings-on reveal more than the sangh parivar’s private battles. Caste acrimony has a role in this conflict: the chief minister and his detractors belong to different competing caste groups. This, along with the persisting economic disadvantages suffered by the backward communities, could seriously strain the BJP’s social engineering endeavours in the future. This would imply that stitching a formidable electoral alliance comprising disparate castes and communities could run into unexpected roadblocks for the BJP.