Once considered to be the bastion of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the safest Lok Sabha seat for the Bharatiya Janata Party in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Gorakhpur has taken a queer turn, forcing the ruling party to deploy all resources at its command to ensure the victory of its candidate, Bhojpuri star Ravi Kishan, from this prestigious constituency which goes to poll in the seventh and last phase of Lok Sabha elections on May 19.
The BJP won the Gorakhpur seat from 1991 till 2018, when the party lost it in the by-election to a joint opposition candidate. The bypoll was necessitated due to resignation of Yogi Adityanath from Lok Sabha after he was elected the UP Legislative Council after becoming the Chief Minister of UP.
“In this election, two constituencies, Gorakhpur and Amethi, have evoked maximum interest. The interest in Amethi was due to the contest between Union Minister and BJP candidate Smriti Irani and Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who is seeking re-election from his traditional seat. In Gorakhpur, the focus is on Yogi Adityanath.
“The question is whether the BJP will be able to wrest the Gorakhpur seat from Samajwadi Party this time,” said Nomita P Kumar from the Giri Institute of Development Studies.
Gorakhpur was considered a BJP bastion because politics in this impoverished region revolved around Gorakhnath Mutt. Earlier, Mahant Avaidyanath represented the Gorakhpur seat in Lok Sabha but after his death, Yogi Adityanath kept on winning the seat since 1998.
But in 2018, Praveen Kumar Nishad of Nishad Party contested the bypoll to Gorakhpur on SP ticket and defeated BJP’s Upendra Dutt Shukla by over 21,000 votes. This was the first experiment of opposition unity which was replicated in Kairana bypoll later.
Since then, Praveen Nishad has joined the BJP and has been fielded from Sant Kabir Nagar constituency.
“The opposition was able to win the Gorakhpur seat because of the combination of castes. Nishads, Dalits and Muslims united and voted against the BJP. Secondly, the voting percentage in bypoll was just 43 per cent, indicating lack of interest among the voters,” Kumar said, adding that the BJP leaders had become complacent about the outcome in their ‘impregnable’ stronghold, an attitude which boomeranged.
The caste equation in Gorakhpur is complex. There are around 4.5 lakh Nishad votes followed by 3.5 lakh Muslims and around 1.5 lakh Dalits. The upper castes account for around 2 lakh votes.
To take advantage of this equation, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance has fielded former minister in Akhilesh government, Ram Bhuwal Nishad from Gorakhpur. He is pitted against BJP’s Ravi Kishan, a Brahmin. The Congress has fielded Madhusudan Tiwari from the seat.
The trouble for the BJP does not end here as one time close confidant of Yogi Adityanath, Sunil Singh, too has jumped into the fray under the banner of Hindu Yuva Vahini Bharat.
At one time, Singh was considered the right hand man of Yogi Adityanath. Singh’s former stature could prove detrimental for the BJP, as he would definitely eat into a chunk of BJP votes.
In this scenario, BJP’s Ravi Kishan relies totally on Yogi Adityanath. Being a Bhojpuri actor, he may draw crowd but will his charisma translate into votes, only time will tell.