Three months after Union Home Minister Amit Shah referred to him as “mere mitr (my friend)” at an event in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya was on Thursday appointed as the BJP co-incharge for the upcoming Bihar elections.
While Maurya’s new responsibility is being perceived as a BJP’s move to consolidate “non-Yadav” OBCs in the Bihar polls, many in the UP BJP see his “elevation to a national-level position” as a signal of his growing stature within the party.
“He (Maurya) is close to Amit Shah ji. This is not a hidden fact as Amit Shah had publicly referred to him as his friend at an event in Lucknow in the presence of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath,” a senior party leader said.
“While Yogi ji certainly would be the star campaigner for the party in Bihar, the management on ground has to be done by someone who has experience of working with the cadre,” he said.
The BJP leader also said that Maurya’s experience of steering the BJP in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, when the party won 324 of the 404 seats in the state after decades of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) governments, would come as a “bonus” for the party in the Bihar polls.
Several UP BJP leaders said the signs of Maurya’s elevation were “visible” for some time. Apart from Shah’s comment, Maurya recently led the Indian delegation to Russia carrying Lord Buddha’s Piprahwa relics.
A party leader said, “In 2019, Maurya was made co-incharge of Maharashtra and the party did well there. However, with Bihar being the adjoining state of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar assumes more significance. The party is making attempts to woo non-Yadav OBCs in Bihar. This elevation would certainly give him a bigger boost in UP polls as well as national politics.”
Maurya’s arc
Maurya, 56, became an MLA for the first time in 2012. He won the Sirathu Assembly seat in the Kaushambi district against the BSP candidate with a margin of about 10,000 votes.
In 2014, when Shah was in-charge of UP, Maurya was chosen to contest Phulpur Lok Sabha seat, once represented by Jawaharlal Nehru and never won by the BJP till then. Maurya won the Phulpur seat for the first time for the BJP.
In 2016, he became the UP BJP president in the run-up to the 2017 Assembly elections.
After the BJP’s record victory in the 2017 polls, there were speculations about Maurya being made the chief minister. However, Yogi Adityanath became the CM and Maurya was made deputy CM along with Dinesh Sharma.
When the Adityanath-led BJP returned to power in the 2022 polls, Sharma was replaced by Brajesh Pathak as the deputy CM but Maurya was repeated in his position even though he lost his election from Sirathu by about 7,000 votes to SP candidate Pallavi Patel. However, he continued to be in the limelight and was later elected as the MLC.
In the wake of the BJP’s setback in UP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when the party’s tally dropped to 33 in the state, differences within the state party leadership had come to surface. Maurya had been outspoken then, with his remark that the “organisation is bigger than the government” creating ripples in political circles.
Recently, Maurya was vocal in criticising a police lathicharge on the ABVP members at a private university in Barabanki. He was among the first party leaders to visit the injured ABVP activists there, assuring action against the guilty officials.