Shah faces challenge of halting OBC drift as SP woos Brahmins

NEW DELHI: Set to take charge of BJP’s bid to defend political turf in Uttar Pradesh, Amit Shah faces an immediate task of arresting the drift of non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

While the BJP leadership continues to watch caste churning in UP ahead of Assembly elections early next year, there’s a growing concern within the party that the smaller castes which helped them beat Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samajwadi Party in the elections since 2014 could be moving away.

Party leaders believe that BJP may have to aggressively woo the likes of Patels, Nishads, Mauryas, Rajbhars and others to boost its prospects.

Shah has a task on hand, with the smaller political parties specifically catering to the political aspirations of such castes asserting their strength in the run-up to the polls.

Success of their counterparts in Bihar last year, most significantly of the Vikassheel Insan Party led by Mukesh Sahini, has seemingly emboldened their bargaining positions.

Shah is credited within the BJP for crafting a grand social engineering of the non-Yadav OBCs along with the upper castes to scale up the electoral base of the party in the state known for identity politics since 1990s.

“After Shah was appointed the BJP in-charge for UP in 2013, he had set out to work on the numerical strength of the non-Yadav OBCs to beat the social engineering of the BSP and SP. But some of such smaller castes numbering up to 10,000-20,000 in each assembly constituency in UP are nursing grievances against BJP, which has to be addressed by the party urgently,” said a senior BJP functionary, who added that the party will need to do more than making Anupriya Patel of Apna Dal a minister in the Central government.