NEW DELHI: Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya lost his own hometown in 2022, and the upset turned out to be the first sign of something larger. The Kurmis, the second largest OBC community in Uttar Pradesh, were starting to leave the BJP.
The Kurmis are numerous enough to swing thirty or forty seats, and for a decade they voted for the BJP in a block. That loyalty has been unravelling since 2022. The NDA took four in five Kurmi votes in 2019, and by last year it was down to three in five.
The strange part is that the BJP has a ready-made answer to exactly this problem, and it has not worked.
Apna Dal was built to keep the Kurmi vote inside the NDA. Three things stop it from doing the job.
Its pull barely reaches past its home base around Mirzapur.
It holds the seats the NDA already had, and takes none from the other side.
It is now easing away from its Kurmi identity to chase other votes.
So the slide goes on, from 80 per cent of the Kurmi vote in 2019 to 61 per cent last year.
The Samajwadi Party has had no such trouble. It went looking for Kurmi leaders at the district level and handed them tickets in numbers the BJP would not match, some of them poached straight from the BSP. Where the BJP put up a Brahmin, the SP often put up a Kurmi, and won.
That points to the deeper problem, which is structural. A national party with a fixed ideology cannot grow caste leaders the way a regional one can, and it will not let individual leaders build a personal following. So it leans on an ally to do the job, and the ally can only reach so far.
