Jitin Prasad’s inclusion in Bhartiya Janta Party from the Congress is but basically a cover-up. If Rajput voters are thoroughly unconvinced with Yogi Adityanath, how can the Brahmin electorate be taken on board? I remember right after the declaration of UP assembly results in 2017, Modi and Shah had asked Manoj Sinha to assume the state’s Chief Ministership with a section of Sang insisting on Yogi at the helm.
No matter how hard the BJP may try coming out of the crisis looks improbable for them, as RSS will lend all its weight behind Yogi Adityanath. So, how do they go around as for their governance lapses and leadership roles? Picking up on caste alliances and coalitions can be one of them as for the Brahmins who have been at the receiving end — sidelined, subjugated and secluded, decimated from the electoral landscape despite being 18% of the state population.
But isn’t it unfair to look down upon leaders like Rita Bahuguna Joshi, a Congress import suave and more credible than Jitin Prasad, losing successive elections? An exercise taken to confuse the Brahmins voters for BJPs sins merely, how can anybody forget the Vikas Dubey encounter and Vikas Tiwari killing bearing a cost to the dignity of this constituency?
Can Jitin Prasad, who is himself not a mass leader, do anything? No, he can’t, as for his access and space in the Congress offering him a boost and leverage championing for the causes and concerns of this community, promising to restore their pride, prestige and dignity. His personal aspirations and ambitions asking him to take an inconclusive role with a party that has not been his own.
How it plays out for the path chosen by Prasad will be everybody’s watch.
In the end, politics is all about optics and perceptions for the BJP. It’s all about manufacturing coverage and broadcast of its electoral and communal package of rhetoric and propaganda. BJP will not like the repeat of a Bengal like fate in UP as for a similar electoral cardiac can upset its equations for 2024.