BJP’s OBC Challenge

Adityanath’s 80:20 formulation comes at a time when the BJP is battling to retain its crucial non-Yadav OBC voters who comprise nearly 35 per cent of the electorate. The idea of a ‘political Hindu’ monolith is being challenged by the growing assertion of smaller OBC parties who feel stifled by the BJP’s upper caste driven social engineering. Interestingly, Akhilesh Yadav is trying to stitch together a rainbow coalition of these parties but whether this grouping can offer a sustained challenge to the BJP’s Hindutva plus welfarism model of governance is uncertain.