Is BJP reaching out to Jats in western Uttar Pradesh again?

LUCKNOW The BJP is perceived to be making new efforts to court the Jat community, which makes up for its numerical disadvantage among the OBC bloc by its concentrated presence in western UP, in anticipation of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This is evidenced by the unveiling of former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh’s statue on his birth anniversary on December 23, possibly by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Moradabad.

Despite the BJP’s victories in western Uttar Pradesh, party leaders acknowledge that the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which has pockets of appeal among Jats (primarily in western UP) and is led by Jayant Chaudhary, grandson of Charan Singh, has so far resisted overtures by the ruling BJP and stayed firmly with the state’s main opposition Samajwadi Party.

The tallest statue of the Jat community icon, Charan Singh, is being unveiled as part of a new outreach to honor his legacy. The announcement coincides with the Yogi Adityanath government’s decision to declare December 23 as a public holiday in honor of Charan Singh’s birth anniversary.

By writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the RLD has attempted to offset the BJP’s outreach by requesting that Charan Singh be given the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna.

The head of the RLD’s trade wing, Rohit Agarwal, said, “We have written to the PM for Bharat Ratna to Chaudhary sahib…and what better day to announce it than December 23, his birth anniversary.”

The RLD motion was promptly challenged by the BJP. “We all support Bharat Ratna for Charan Singh Ji as well. Union minister and Muzaffarnagar MP Sanjeev Balyan addressed HT, “But the issue is what were parties like RLD, who spent extended spells in power at the Center, were doing all this while?

Although Balyan denied that Jats are not affiliated with the BJP, it seems that Moradabad was a deliberate decision for the statue’s inauguration.

Seven seats, including all six in the Moradabad division, were from west Uttar Pradesh out of the 16 seats the BJP lost in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Even though the BJP had a strong showing overall in the 2022 UP polls, the SP-RLD continued to make waves in the Jat belt, winning 17 of the 27 seats in the Moradabad division compared to the BJP’s 10 and 9 of the 16 seats in the Saharanpur region, from which the Congress began its UP Jodo Yatra on Tuesday.

Shortly after, Bhupendra Chaudhary—who had resigned as a Panchayati Raj minister in the Yogi Adityanath government—became the BJP’s first Jat head from west Uttar Pradesh, surprising a lot of people.

In Muzaffarnagar, where Union minister Sanjeev Balyan, a Jat politician, is the local MP, the BJP lost the Khatauli assembly bypoll just as Chaudhary was getting used to his new role after his stunning victories in the urban local body elections.

“It’s true that the BJP is trying very hard to win over Jats, and it’s not like they haven’t cast ballots for the party.” This is shown by the victories in the Lok Sabha elections of Hema Malini from Mathura and former Mumbai police chief Satyapal Singh from Baghpat. Although the BJP’s outreach is commendable, the SP-RLD alliance has prevented the party from making significant progress (with the community), according to Muzaffarnagar-born Dharamvir Balyan, the head of the RLD’s disciplinary committee.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also attacked the SP-RLD alliance in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections because OBC leaders Akhilesh Yadav of the SP and Jayant Chaudhary of the RLD were making a “anna pledge” (a commitment to forgo food grains out of unity). PM Modi visited Aligarh in the run-up to the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections in order to dedicate a state institution bearing the name of the Jat ruler Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh.

The approach was seen at the time as a means of appeasing the people leading the protests against the three agricultural regulations.

Leader of the Samajwadi Party Sudhir Panwar stated, “The Jats have backed BJP in various elections, but they finally settled with SP-RLD combine because SP took up issues like Jat reservation, cleared sugarcane dues, and provided cheap electricity.”