Bypolls defeat as Keshav Prasad Maurya not made CM: UP minister Om Prakash Rajbhar

Ballia (Uttar Pradesh): Uttar Pradesh minister Om Prakash Rajbhar said on Monday that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost the recent bypolls as the other backward castes (OBCs) were not happy with the party. He said the reason for the disenchantment was that the BJP didn't make Keshav Prasad Maurya the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

"The BJP contested assembly polls with Keshav Prasad Maurya (a OBC) as its face but later Yogi Adityanath was made chief minister. Backwards supported the BJP in the hope that Maurya will become CM. The result of this anger reflected in the defeat of the BJP in bypolls", Rajbhar, who is cabinet minister and head of Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party, told news agency PTI over phone.

Asked whether Yogi Adityanath is responsible for the defeat in bypolls, he said, "Government is responsible. The BJP should introspect about reasons for its defeat. It's up to the BJP whom to make CM. It's up to the party to make Yogi or Keshav as CM."

The BJP recently lost the Kairana parliamentary by-election and the Noorpur Assembly bypoll in Uttar Pradesh.

Tabassum Hasan of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) won the Kairana seat by a margin of 44,618 votes, while Naeemul Hasan of the Samajwadi Party bagged the Noorpur Assembly seat by 5,662 votes.

The winning RLD candidate in Kairana was backed by the Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. In Noorpur, the main opposition parties supported the SP candidate.

Against this united opposition, the BJP's all-out effort to stop a chain of losses in by-polls in the state since 2014 proved futile even though Chief Minister Adityanath led from the front.