No impact of OBC MLAs leaving BJP: Maurya

Lucknow: Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya on Sunday said desertion of OBC ministers and MLAs from the BJP will have no impact on the party’s poll prospects in UP as all sections of society trust PM Narendra Modi.

They have left to fulfil their “self-interest” and not for “any ideology”, the BJP leader said. Recently, Swami Prasad Maurya, Dara Singh Chauhan and Dharam Singh Saini quit the state cabinet and the BJP to join the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) along with some legislators.

Dismissing any challenge from rivals in the high-decibel seven-phase Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, which begins next month, Deputy Chief Minister Maurya said it was claimed that the BJP would be impacted in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, but the party won, and used the Hindi proverb ‘khoda pahar, nikle chuhiya’ to describe the claim makers.

He claimed that like in 2019, after the assembly polls’ results are declared on March 10 neither Yadav, Congress’ Priyanka Gandhi Vadra nor other “so-called challengers” to the BJP will be seen.

The desertion was seen as a major blow to the BJP’s support among Other Backward Castes (OBCs), which form over 50% of UP’s population.

Hitting out at the defectors, he said in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won 73 of the 80 seats in UP, and then these people were not with the BJP.

The BJP won again in the 2017 assembly polls after the historic win of 2014, Maurya, a prominent OBC face of the saffron party in the state, said.

Swami Prasad Maurya, Chauhan and Saini had left the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and joined the BJP before the 2017 state polls. “Somebody joining the party or leaving it hardly makes a difference as the BJP is very strong at the booth level.

I don’t feel that any voter has gone with them (defectors). They have gone out of their vested self-interest and not for any ideology,” Deputy Chief Minister Maurya said. —PTI