Ultra Hindu heckler Yogi Adiyanath of the Bharatiya Janata Party is mightily peeved with his organisation’s mandarins. His latest angst is that the party did not consult him on the selection of candidates for the upcoming Uttar Pradesh state polls.
Adiyanath apparently has a huge clout in at least 40 state assembly constituencies. Naturally, he had expected that the high command’s Central Election Committee, of which he is not a member, would at least invite him in an advisory capacity in the candidate selection process. But nothing of that sort happened. He was not invited for the meeting. Worse, no one so much as called him over telephone to seek his comments.
It may be recalled that in the last meeting of the party’s working committee, he was denied the chance to speak, and he had left the meeting in a huff on the very first day itself. Now Yogi seems to be convinced that all this is a well-crafted conspiracy to finish off his political career in the party.
Yogi’s youth forces have a lot of muscle in both eastern and western UP. In the past, whenever he had been meted out such an ignominy, he had got his own candidates to get tickets from the Hindu Mahasabha, and the burden of problems had to be shouldered by the BJP. It will be interesting to see how he acts this time around and how the party reacts in the latest fracas.