An internal survey of the Bharatiya Janata Party has shown that majority of party MPs from Uttar Pradesh have failed to live up to the expectations of the people and at least 57 of them may be denied ticket in the coming Lok Sabha elections.
This has been categorically conveyed to the party leaders of UP by BJP national president Amit Shah in a meeting held in New Delhi on Wednesday. The meeting was called to evaluate party’s position in UP.
The internal survey was carried out by a private US-based research institute which interviewed people in 822 blocks spread over 8,135 nyaya panchayats.
“The bottom line of the survey is that majority of the MPs have failed to deliver and they might be denied ticket in the coming Lok Sabha elections,” a senior BJP leader told ‘The Pioneer’ here on Thursday.
It is believed that axe might fall n 57 sitting MPs.
BJP had won 71 Lok Sabha seats out of 80 in UP on its own in the 2014 parliamentary elections but it lost three seats in the Lok Sabha bye-elections, including Gorakhpur and Phulpur. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya had won from Gorakhpur and Phulpur, respectively, in 2014 and had vacated the seats after they joined the UP Cabinet.
A senior BJP leader said that the survey was holistic and included “voices” from over 97,000 villages across the state.
“The basic finding of this study was that majority of the MPs have failed to connect with the masses. Selection of beneficiaries of various welfare schemes was left to administration and these MPs never tried to meet the people and make an attempt to tell them that whatever benefits they were getting was because of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath,” the leader said.
The BJP has launched a series of campaigns to educate people about the welfare schemes that the government has launched. It has repeatedly asked its leaders and elected representatives to meet the beneficiaries of these schemes. The idea behind this is that the beneficiaries should be motivated to vote for BJP in the next election because of the benefits they had availed of in this regime.
The survey has highlighted many USPs of the BJP government — from farmers’ welfare to providing houses and free electric connections to the people.
“The crop loan waiver has failed to make any political impact as the BJP leaders have failed to make farmers realise that it was the Yogi Adityanath government that was instrumental in extending the loan waiver. With the passage of time, the memory faded and now farmers do not talk about it,” the survey has said.
The survey report also highlights failure of the MPs to redress local grievances of farmers. At many places, the MPs even stopped meeting people, thus widening the chasm between the farmers and them,” it said.
Interestingly, some of the BJP MPs are aware of the fait accompli and therefore they have started knocking the doors of Samajwadi Party.
Sources in the SP claim that at least 4 BJP MPs have approached the party and only one of them, Savitribai Phule who represents Bahraich in the Lok Sabha, has got a positive response from the party.
