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    How the BJP went beyond its upper-caste bastion

    Nalin MehtaBy Updated:No Comments2 Mins Read
    Dec 18, 2021 |Hindustan Times |By: Nalin Mehta
    To give a bird’s eye view of the numbers, OBCs and SCs accounted for as many as 57.5% of the BJP’s UP Lok Sabha candidates in the 2019 general election, 52.8% of its candidates in the 2017 assembly poll that it swept, 50% of its office-bearers in the state in 2020, 48.1% of UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s council of ministers and 35.6% of the BJP’s district-level presidents (Ashok Dutta/HTPhoto)

    The BJP has become the most socially representative party in UP by caste. In the process, the party has reduced upper-caste dominance. However, this social engineering has been done without losing the support of the upper-castes

    In June 2020, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi pointed out to his party workers that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was represented by 113 Other Backward Class (OBC), 43 Scheduled Tribe (ST) and 53 Scheduled Caste (SC) Members of Parliament (MPs) in the Lok Sabha (LS). In other words, 37.2% of the BJP’s Lok Sabha MPs were OBC, 14.1% ST and 17.4% SC. This meant that 68.9% (209) of its 303 Lok Sabha MPs elected in 2019 were non-upper-caste, and from castes that were traditionally considered lower down in the caste hierarchy. Click here to Read full article

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    Nalin Mehta is Managing Editor, Moneycontrol, Chief AI Officer - Editorial Operations, Network18 and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He is an award-winning Indian journalist, political scientist and author who has held senior leadership positions in major media companies and educational institutions; served as an international civil servant with the UN and the Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland; taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (La Trobe University, ANU), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (Shiv Nadar University, IIM Bangalore). Most recently, he has been Dean and Professor at School of Modern Media, UPES University. He has previously been Group Consulting Editor, Network18; Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, Managing Editor, India Today (TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. Mehta is the author of several best-selling and critically acclaimed books, including The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (hailed as a ‘seminal’ work, No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller lists for 26 consecutive weeks in 2022, and republished worldwide in several languages); India’s Techade: Digital Revolution and Change in the World’s Largest Democracy, India on Television (Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (Longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015) and Dreams of a Billion (2022 Ekamra Sports Book of the Year Award, co-authored). His edited books include Gujarat Beyond Gandhi (co-editor), Television in India and The Changing Face of Cricket (co-editor). Mehta is a DFID-Commonwealth scholar with a Ph.D in Political Science from Trobe University, Melbourne; M.A. International Relations from University of East Anglia, UK; and B.A. Journalism (Honours) from University of Delhi.

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