Sangh for hardline BJP face in UP polls

With “Hindutva” emerging as the main poll plank of the BJP, the Sangh Parivar is rooting for a hardliner to be the party’s face for the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls and week-long celebrations are being planned at Ayodhya from June 10 to revive the Ram mandir issue.

Union minister Mahesh Sharma and party MP Yogi Adityanath are reportedly being favoured by the Sangh Parivar over Union human resources development minister Smriti Irani and BJP Lok Sabha member Varun Gandhi.

BJP hardliners and the RSS are trying to push Dr Sharma to the top of the list. To send a signal, Dr Sharma will be attending the Ram Janmabhoomi event at Ayodhya.

The week-long celebration will be held to mark the birth anniversary of Ram Janmabhoomi Trust chief Nritya Gopal Das.

Sandwiched between the caste-based politics of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the BJP intends to employ the politics of polarisation to try to consolidate the Hindu vote bank in its favour.

If Yogi Adityanath was the face of the party’s “Love Jihad” before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, attempts are being made to project Dr Sharma as the “Hindutva poster boy”.

At this juncture in UP’s caste cauldron, the BJP is struggling to retain its Lok Sabha appeal. Riding the Modi wave during the 2014 general election, the BJP had bagged 73 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP.

“That’s not going to work anymore and we might have to fall back on our tried and tested formula of Hindutva,” a UP BJP leader said. A doctor by profession who runs a chain of hospitals, Dr Sharma has been a “blue-eyed boy” of the RSS. On his personal website (http://www.drmaheshsharmabjp.com), the minister is described as “a staunch follower of Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) since childhood”.

His controversial remarks, starting from the Dadri lynching to the attacks on Africans, have apparently “impressed” hardliners in UP. It may be recalled that after taking over as minister, Dr Sharma said on record that the “Centre was committed to building the Ram temple”.

In fact, he had also claimed that the Centre would spend Rs 170 crore to build a museum on Ayodhya’s “Ram Van Gaman Path”, the route Lord Ram is believed to have taken while going into exile for 14 years. A year after this statement, Dr Sharma is now trying to echo Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “development plank” by saying, “The Ram temple will not be on our poll agenda‘.

However, his projection, BJP hardliners feel, will send a clear signal to the party’s core vote bank. Speaking to this newspaper, a BJP functionary closely associated with the RSS claimed that “Sharma would be a good choice to lead the poll campaign”and quickly added that Dr Sharma was “very popular in his constituency”.