It was June 2016, well past midnight. The then BJP national president Amit Shah sat quietly in the party’s Agra office, listening intently as UP unit leaders briefed him on the region’s caste matrix and the issues troubling local residents in the region. “Yahan under current hai…. issey aur badhana hai,” Shah responded, highlighting at length the steps that the party was required to take for bolstering public connect in the run up to assembly elections which were only months away. The leaders nodded and quickly dispersed. Shah’s local and regional meetings had become not just a routine exercise but an aggressive practice as BJP, which had spent 15 years in political wilderness in Uttar Pradesh since 2002, nestled ambition of nudging the then Samajwadi Party govt led by CM Akhilesh Yadav. BJP had already done most of the groundwork since 2014 when it won 71 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP and Narendra Modi became both the PM and the face of the party. BJP’s resurgence eventually crystallised in the 2017 UP assembly elections when it got a sweeping mandate—winning 312 out of the 403 assembly seats, decimating regional players like SP and BSP. Not surprisingly, once pushed to the fringes of UP’s complex caste driven politics, BJP has since 2017 engineered one of the most striking political transformations in India’s largest state. Its nine straight years in office has been marked by structural, social and governance shifts. “The party did not seem to be in the thick of the contest for years as caste politics drove electoral outcomes,” said UP BJP spokesperson Hero Bajpai. He said the massive victory in 2014 marked the watershed moment even as BJP leapfrogged from just “any other political outfit” to a gargantuan “poll machinery” under the direct watch of PM Modi and Shah. BJP sources said that ideological support of the RSS has grown manifold, stoking a wave of Hindutva that ripped through the caste maze. BJP, at the same time, widened its caste coalition to counter the SP and BSP. Congress, on the other hand, got further marginalised in the state. The appointment of Yogi Adityanath as CM marked an ideological and administrative shift, blending Hindutva politics with a strong centralised governance model. Experts said the BJP primarily focused on projecting a strong state narrative, positioning itself as a break from what it described as “lawlessness” under previous govts. Crackdown on crime and visible policing became central to political messaging. The “bulldozer politics” image too emerged as a symbol of enforcement driven governance. The narrative has helped the BJP consolidate support among urban voters and business classes. Unlike earlier caste-centric mobilisations, the BJP crafted a dual strategy of welfare delivery (direct benefit schemes targeting women, farmers, and the poor) and cultural politics, thus envisaged emphasis on religious identity and symbolic issues. BJP has also strengthened its cadre-based structure and projects itself as an organisation driven party. This involved booth-level expansion, micro social engineering among non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits and integration with ideological affiliates. Experts said that when BJP returned to office in 2022, development cemented its dominance. The party also leaned on development narratives—massive expansion in infrastructure (expressways, airports and logistic hubs etc), rapid growth in state budget size and capital spending and the push for a USD 1 trillion economy vision. Political analysts maintain that a robust leadership in the form of Narendra Modi at the Centre and Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh has driven the party’s electoral dominance. “The party has a strong leadership. This necessitates strong discipline and a control over the cadre,” noted Prof SK Pandey, former head of political science department at the Baba Saheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar University. He said BJP has been emerging as a party with huge financial and organisational resources that helped it expand itself across every political space. Prof Pandey, however, said the status of a political party is not permanent. He said there have been times when the cadre started eulogising their leaders which had its counter effects. The lack of second rung leadership too impacts the growth of the party in the long run, he said.
