Ahead of polls, UP adds 7 new ministers to cabinet
Manish Chandra Pandey and Smriti Kak Ramachandran the party’s outreach for the most backward among OBCS and poorest among Dalits,” said a former BJP leader, asking not to be named.
The BJP won 312 seats in the 2017 UP polls in the 403-member assembly with a vote share of 41.7%.
The latest expansion, the last before the 2022 UP polls, party leaders admit, has been taken with an eye on balancing various castes, including those that so far were unrepresented.
Just before he arrived at the Raj Bhavan for the swearing-in ceremony, chief minister Yogi Adityanath tweeted: “Na bhrastachaar karenge, na kisi ko karne denge. Sarkar ki neeti aur neeyat dono saaf hai (We will neither do corruption nor allow anyone else to do it. The government’s policy and plan are very clear).”
“We welcome our new friends in government. Together, we will work and win 2022 UP polls,” said the state’s backward classes welfare minister Anil Rajbhar, an OBC. UP is well represented in the Narendra Modi government, too, with 14 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPS as ministers. The BJP has 84 MPS from the state, including 62 in the Lok Sabha and 22 in the Rajya Sabha, while its ally Apna Dal has two members.
The changes are an indication that while the BJP is strengthening its social engineering formula of bringing together a coalition of disparate castes, it has kept its eye on the OBCS, a category that has more political heft and contributed 40% of the votes that the party bagged in the last three elections — the general elections of 2014 and 2019 and the 2017 assembly elections.
The outreach towards the OBCS comes at a time when the opposition parties and BJP’S own allies are seeking a caste-based census. While those supporting such a census claim getting exact numerical strength of each community will help sharpen the existing policies for their uplift, the BJP has been evasive on the issue. Last week, the Union government told Supreme Court in a petition that collecting data on backward class of citizens during the upcoming census is administratively complex.
CM Yogi raises sugarcane MSP by ₹25/quintal LUCKNOW: Ahead of the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, chief minister Yogi Adityanath
on Sunday announced ₹25 per quintal hike in the purchase price of sugarcane in the state.
“We have decided that the price of the sugarcane variety (early variety) for which ₹325 per quintal was paid to farmers would be increased to ₹350. My government has also decided to increase the price of ordinary sugarcane variety to ₹340 (per quintal).the government has also decided to hike the value of the less yielding variety of sugarcane by ₹25 per quintal,” he said, addressing a farmers’ meeting convened by the BJP’S farmers’ wing in Lucknow.
Previously, farmers were paid ₹315 per quintal for ordinary variety of sugarcane. In UP, there are three varieties of sugarcane — early , mid-late and late. The early variety of sugarcane are those that mature earlier than the others.
“The early variety constitutes 97 per cent of the sugarcane cultivated (in the state), followed by 2.7 per cent of the ordinary variety and the rejected variety, which constitutes barely 0.3 per cent,” state Sugarcane Development and Sugar Mills Minister Suresh Rana told PTI.