Om Prakash Rajbhar said the government is responsible for the loss. (File)
Highlights
- The minister said that backward castes were angry with BJP
- He said the loss is the Uttar Pradesh government's responsibility
- He said governance of the poor is not happening at local level
Uttar Pradesh minister Om Prakash Rajbhar said on Monday that the Bharatiya Janata Party lost the recent bypolls as the other backward castes(OBCs) were not happy with the party. He said the reason for the disenchantment was that the BJP didn't make Keshav Prasad Maurya the chief minister of the state.
He said the BJP contested the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections last year with Keshav Prasad Maurya as its face, but later Yogi Adityanath was made the chief minister of the state. He said ,"Backwards supported the BJP in the hope that Maurya will become CM. The result of this anger reflected in the defeat of the BJP in bypolls".
Asked whether Yogi Adityanath is responsible for the defeat in bypolls, he said, "Government is responsible. The BJP should introspect about reasons for its defeat. It's up to the BJP whom to make CM. It's up to the party to make Yogi or Keshav as CM."
Mr Rajbhar further said that since the government is led by Yogi Adityanath, "it's his responsibility as much as mine".
"It is the BJP's internal matter. But I want to say that the participation in governance of the poor and the backward at the local level is not being ensured," Mr Rajbhar added.
The BJP recently lost the Kairana parliamentary by-election and the Noorpur assembly bypoll in Uttar Pradesh.
Tabassum Hasan of the Rashtriya Lok Dal won the Kairana seat by a margin of 44,618 votes, while Naeemul Hasan of the Samajwadi Party bagged the Noorpur Assembly seat by 5,662 votes.
The winning RLD candidate in Kairana was backed by the Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. In Noorpur, the main opposition parties supported the SP candidate.
Against this united opposition, the BJP's all-out effort to stop a chain of losses in by-polls in the state since 2014 proved futile even though Chief Minister Adityanath led from the front.
With inputs from PTI