Uttar Pradesh: Keshav Prasad Maurya's Rebellion Against Yogi Adityanath Has Not Fizzled Out

A week has passed since Keshav Prasad Maurya met Bharatiya Janata Party national president Jagat Prakash Nadda, but nothing seems to have changed in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Deputy Chief Minister's power play against Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

Yesterday (23 July), Maurya met Sanjay Nishad. This was his second meeting with the NISHAD party national president recently. While Maurya called it a "courtesy meet" in a post on X, observers are linking it to political power play.

Since the declaration of Lok Sabha results on 4 June, Maurya has been meeting people known to hold grudges against Adityanath. Nishad is one of them who has earlier criticised the 'bulldozer action' of the UP Chief Minister.

Nishad was accompanied by the NISHAD party's state president Ravindra Mani Nishad. Speculations are rife that they might have met Maurya to discuss the upcoming assembly by-polls for 10 seats in UP.

NISHAD party wants to contest in Kanpur's Majhawan, a seat vacated by its MLA Vinod Kumar Bind upon winning the Lok Sabha election from Bhadohi on a BJP ticket.

However, the BJP is reluctant to offer the seat to its ally on account of its poor performance in the Lok Sabha election. Sanjay Nishad's son Praveen lost the Lok Sabha election from Sant Kabir Nagar on a BJP ticket. The party also could not attract votes for the BJP at other places.

But instead of meeting Chief Minister Adityanath, who is supervising the UP Assembly elections for the BJP, Nishad met Maurya, suggesting that an attempt to project the Deputy Chief Minister as another power centre is underway.

Another similar incident took place when Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar met Maurya on 22 July. Notably, on the same day, Adityanath had called a meeting of public representatives of Varanasi division.

Being an MLA from Ghazipur's Zahoorabad, Rajbhar is also public representative from Varanasi division. But, instead of joining the Chief Minister's meet in Varanasi, Rajbhar was in Lucknow to meet Maurya.

While Rajbhar has clarified that he was in Lucknow to take part in the meeting of district panchayat heads and had informed the Chief Minister beforehand about his absence, political observers view these meeting as a grouping of backward class leaders.

Rajbhar was inducted into the Adityanath cabinet as Panchayati Raj Minister in March this year. His party SBSP contested as a Samajwadi Party (SP) ally in the 2022 UP Assembly elections but joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance later.

Maurya, Nishad and Rajbhar, all three are Other Backward Classes (OBC) leaders. The OBCs, who are known to have supported the BJP in UP in the past decade, are said to have drifted apart from the party in this election.

With this power positioning, the three leaders might be wanting to show their importance to the party.

Maurya has also met other OBC leaders recently like former Sitapur MP Rajesh Verma, UP Cabinet Minister Dara Singh Chauhan, former MLA Dharmendra Singh Shakya and BJP OBC Morcha UP president Narendra Kashyap in the past few days.

Maurya has even raised the issue of reservations in contractual appointments in different departments of the UP government and has written to chief secretary of Department of Appointments and Personnel Devesh Chaturvedi.

He has asked Chaturvedi whether the provisions of reservations of Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and OBCs, defined in the government order when Mayawati was the chief minister, are being followed in contractual appointments.

Notably, the Department of Appointments and Personnel is under Chief Minister Adityanath. Questioning the functioning of this department is seen as questioning the Chief Minister himself.

Earlier too, Maurya was in headlines for making a veiled attack at Adityanath when he said, "Sangathan sarkar se bada hai (The organisation is bigger than the government)," at a key UP BJP meet on 14 July.

He was then called to Delhi to meet Nadda on 16 July. Swarajya reported that in the meeting either UP by-polls would have been discussed or Maurya made some demands for positions in party or government or he might have been asked to toe Adityanath's line.

However, the last possibility does not appear to be true now as instead of bending over before Adityanath, Maurya is continuing the power play of consolidating Adityanath's adversaries and trying to emerge as another power centre in UP politics.