By Our Political Reporter
Lucknow: Power in Uttar Pradesh is not lost in a single riot or a single survey. It is lost when the people a party once poached begin to hear their own names spoken as afterthoughts. For a decade the BJP sold Yogi Adityanath as the man who welded Hindu society into one fist—Brahmins and Thakurs at the core, non-Yadav backwards and non-Jatav Dalits as the knuckles. The fist is opening. Not because the opposition suddenly became lovable, but because the government still governs like a garrison and talks like a caste club.
That is the meaning of this week, not the viral clip alone. A chief minister walks out of a briefing while a woman journalist asks about waterlogging; party men close in as if a question were an offence. A Nishad minister sits on the road against his own police after a trader is killed and demands the same bulldozer the state brandishes at other communities. Upper-caste outfits still seethe over UGC equity rules they read as a hunt for general-category students. None of this is a “narrative.” It is the coalition arguing with itself in public.
The electoral proof is older than the video. In 2019 the BJP’s UP stack was brutal in its simplicity: near-monopoly of Rajputs and Brahmins, a fat slice of Kurmi-Koeri and other non-Yadav OBCs, and a decisive share of non-Jatav Dalits. By 2024 the top held; the bottom slipped. Lokniti-CSDS numbers showed Rajput loyalty still near 89 percent. Non-Jatav Dalit support for the NDA fell from around half to about 29 percent. Kurmi-Koeri support dropped from the high seventies toward 60. Other OBCs followed the same slope. Yadavs and Muslims tightened around the SP-led INDIA bloc, which took 43 of 80 seats. PDA—Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak—did not invent a majority. It collected the votes the BJP stopped earning.
The leak did not stop at Parliament. Party booth maps now count some 18,900 booths that flipped between the 2022 assembly win and the 2024 Lok Sabha shock, mostly rural, thick in Awadh and Purvanchal, among Kushwaha, Nishad, Kurmi and non-Jatav Dalit pockets. A Kurmi state president and a late cabinet infusion of OBC and Dalit faces are admissions, not strategy. Dalits remain under-weight in power relative to a 21–22 percent population share. Brahmin and Thakur ministers still look like the owners of the house. Caste dinners of ruling-party MLAs make the ownership visible. Hindu unity, in this telling, has a surname.
The government’s loudmouths make the insult expensive. Loose talk of rewriting the Constitution in 2024 did what no opposition pamphlet could: it told Dalits and backwards that reservation was a temporary courtesy. Influencers who treat Dalit protest as pollution, local satraps who treat OBC assertion as insolence, and a daily diet of “Babar will not return” do not consolidate Hindus. They teach Pasi, Kori, Nishad and Kurmi youth that the saffron tent has a VIP enclosure. Every paper leak, every “Not Found Suitable” in recruitment, every stalled teacher list lands on that lesson. The state answers with more demolitions and more sermons. That is not outreach. It is contempt with a loudspeaker.
The bulldozer still has admirers. Crime figures the government cites are not fiction. The political problem is selectivity and saturation. After nine years, spectacle does not substitute for jobs. When an ally minister must beg “zero tolerance” from Yogi’s own police, the brand has begun to prosecute its own coalition. Courts have already split over due process in demolition cases. Rights groups have said for years that the machine is extra-judicial and communally stained. The new fact is narrower and more dangerous for Lucknow: the same machine now looks unreliable to the backwards and Dalits who were supposed to make the Hindu majority electorally complete.
Surveys still put Adityanath ahead as a CM face. That is residual personal capital, not a social alliance. Voters are angrier with MLAs than with the chief minister; that is organisational rot under a cult of one. The opposition is flawed—seat-sharing is messy, Mayawati is isolated, SP has its own caste arrogance. None of that is a defence of a government that treats questions as insult, reservation as seasonal piety, and Dalit-backward dignity as a poster for Ambedkar Jayanti.
Uttar Pradesh will not be decided by who shouts “Hindu” louder. It will be decided by whether the people the BJP once lifted out of the BSP and out of the non-Yadav OBC belt still believe the shout includes them. Right now the shout has a caste accent, a closed presser, and a minister on the pavement. That is not invincibility. That is a ruling party beginning to evict the votes that made it look inevitable.