Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party president Om Prakash Rajbhar, after being shown the door by the Samajwadi Party and rebuffed by Bahujan Samaj Party, wants to return to the Bharatiya Janata Party fold for the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
The SBSP had contested the 2017 polls in alliance with the BJP but the relations between the two parties soured in 2019 and SBSP chief Om Prakash Rajbhar was dismissed from the UP cabinet by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
The recent presidential election seems to have brought the two former allies closer and Rajbhar voted for National Democratic Alliance candidate Droupadi Murmu. According to sources, the BJP also is keen to further strengthen its reach among Other Backward Classes for the Lok Sabha election.
Accounting for over 40 per cent of the electorate in Uttar Pradesh, the OBC community has been a key constituent of the social coalition for all political parties. While Rajbhar is now seeking a return to the BJP fold, he is also eyeing a seat in the Vidhan Parishad for his son, Arvind Rajbhar, who had lost the recent assembly election from Shivpur constituency in Varanasi.
Rajbhar's supporters claim that another BJP ally, Sanjay Nishad, has been given a seat in the Vidhan Parishad, a ministerial position while his elder son is an MP and younger son is an MLA. Going by the same formula, the SBSP also deserves a better deal, they claim.
By-elections are due for two seats of UP Legislative Council. Rajbhar wants his son to be accommodated in the Vidhan Parishad before he announces his loyalty to the BJP again.
BJP’s OBC Morcha chief Narendra Kashyap says that the backward classes know what the BJP has done for them. "We have constituted an OBC Commission and given space to more than two dozen ministers from the OBC background in the Narendra Modi cabinet," he said.
Meanwhile, Rajbhar launched a scathing attack on Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, saying, “Akhilesh Yadav has inherited political power while I am in politics due to hard work at the grassroots level among the downtrodden and the disadvantaged sections of society.”
“Akhilesh Yadav is doing politics from a cosy and comfortable zone to a social zone while I live amidst the people. It was Akhilesh’s style of functioning that forced me to vote for Droupadi Murmu,” Rajbhar said.