THE CHIEF MINISTER OF UTTAR PRADESH, Adityanath, turned 52 years old on 5 June. As he has done in recent years, he planted a sapling—his birthday falls on World Environment Day—and received greetings on social media from Bharatiya Janata Party colleagues, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Under his able leadership, the state has scaled new heights of progress,” Modi wrote. “He has ensured pro-people governance to the people of the state.” The celebrations were muted. There was no 111-foot cake, as there had been for his fiftieth birthday, and Adityanath did not hold a puja in Gorakhpur, as he had done for his fifty-first. Instead, he was in his Lucknow office, receiving a series of “courtesy calls,” as his social-media feed put it, from the senior party leadership.
There was much to discuss. The results of the 2024 general election had been announced the previous day. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance had set itself the target of winning all 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state, with a vote share of 55 percent. Despite having handily defeated a grand alliance of the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal in 2019—and having since secured the support of the RLD—it instead lost 30 seats, with its vote share falling by almost ten percentage points. Uttar Pradesh accounted for almost half of the BJP’s nationwide losses, as Modi failed to lead the party to a legislative majority for the first time in his electoral career. Seven sitting union ministers lost their seats: Smriti Irani, Mahendra Nath Pandey, Ajay Mishra Teni, Sanjeev Balyan, Niranjan Jyoti, Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma and Kaushal Kishore. Modi and his defence minister, Rajnath Singh, had their margins of victory slashed to a third.
On 8 June, Adityanath summoned a cabinet meeting to rally the troops. He told his ministers to “go to the field, communicate with sensitivity and solve the people’s problems with the aid of public representatives and the local administration.” He warned them to be careful about how they were perceived by the public. “None of our activities should reflect VIP culture,” he said. The sternness and call to action could not quite mask the fact that Adityanath’s grip on the state seemed to be slipping.
The Uttar Pradesh BJP was struggling to come to terms with its first serious setback in over a decade. Fingers were being pointed in every direction. Adityanath’s supporters blamed the national party for cutting him out of the loop while making decisions over the campaign. His ministers and legislators blamed him for denying them a say over government policy. Party workers were angry at incumbent members of parliament for being inaccessible, at outsiders for being given plum posts immediately after joining the BJP and at local bureaucrats and police officials for disrespecting them and ignoring their complaints. The party’s upper-caste supporters resented the increased representation for Other Backward Classes and Dalits, while the latter believed that the representation was nowhere near enough.