The BJP’s UP campaign is beginning to look more and more like its disastrous electoral effort in Bihar in 2015. The distribution of tickets has set off rebellions at all levels in the party, leaving Amit Shah with the headache of soothing frayed tempers and ensuring that disgruntled aspirants don’t turn rebel candidates.

This column had already talked about the explosion from Gorakhpur strongman Yogi Adityanath who may take a back seat in the campaign unless Shah succeeds in bringing him around. But Adityanath is not the BJP president’s only problem.

There’s Varun Gandhi who is upset about the smear campaign carried out against him some months ago. Not only did his party not defend him, there is a suspicion that a section of the leadership may have had a hand in circulating the slanderous videos. Party circles fear that he may not campaign in central UP where he commands influence. Worse, there is anxiety that he has the potential to sabotage their prospects.

OBC leader Vinay Katiyar, once a prominent face of the Ram mandir agitation, is upset too. He was neither consulted during the ticket distribution process, nor have his loyalists been accommodated by Shah. The 12 MLAs who contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and won are also threatening to turn dissident. Although they are now MPs, they wanted tickets for family members to preserve their assembly fiefdoms. They have not been accommodated although scions of other political families have been given nominations, like Rajnath Singh’s son Pankaj, Lalji Tandon’s son Gopalji and Kalyan Singh’s grandson Sandeep who is a political greenhorn.

On the other hand, Shah has gone out of his way to accommodate new entrants in the candidates list. The two lists announced so far include the names of at least 25 turncoats from rival parties who joined the BJP just the other day.

Party loyalists are not the only ones upset. Some OBC leaders who came in from other parties are up in arms. Swami Prasad Maurya of the BSP and Om Prakash Rajbhar are upset because they claim that Shah has not delivered on his promises when he persuaded them to join hands with the BJP. The BJP president is supposed to have agreed to give tickets to their loyalists who followed them to the BJP.

In Bihar, the BJP had unraveled during the campaign for similar reasons as Shah and his team rode roughshod over the local leadership. Prominent Bihar leaders like former deputy chief minister Sushil Modi were forced to keep a low profile during the campaign and hardly figured on BJP posters and hoardings. Shah’s highhandedness led to a humiliating defeat in the state. UP leaders are worried that UP 2017 is looking frighteningly similar to Bihar 2015.

Awkward moments

There were several awkward moments for Kapil Sibal when he appeared for Akhilesh Yadav in the Election Commission to fight for the cycle symbol. It was embarrassing for him because he was battling Mulayam Singh Yadav to whom he owes a debt of gratitude for facilitating his re-entry into the Rajya Sabha last year. The Congress did not have enough MLAs to get Sibal elected. It was Mulayam who passed on his extra votes and helped Sibal get into the Upper House.

Sibal may not have accepted Akhilesh’s brief to fight the symbol case in the EC because of this. But the Congress had a vested interest in Akhilesh winning the symbol case so that it could finalise its pre-poll alliance with the UP chief minister. So it requested Sibal to take on the case on Akhilesh’s behalf. Sibal, a leading lawyer, had no choice but to obey his high command and of course, he won the cycle symbol for Akhilesh.

Sibal felt awkward as he argued for Akhilesh. Mulayam sat silently through the proceedings without looking at the Congress legal eagle. But the most awkward moment came later, when they met in the lift on their way down. Sibal smiled with embarrassment and told the SP patriarch the he hoped to help him too some day.

Not enough?

The arrest of former Air Chief S P Tyagi in the Augusta Westland case surprised many because the CBI really didn’t have enough evidence to prove a money trail. In fact, the CBI was rapped severely by the Supreme Court on this count as it ordered that Tyagi be released on bail.

Congress circles see a political design in the arrest. They feel that it was a bid to silence Manmohan Singh whose stringent criticism of demonetization had rattled the Modi government. In a brief speech in Parliament, Singh had called it a monumental blunder and predicted a 2 per cent drop in GDP growth. Singh’s words turned the tide against the government as more and more economists began to question the wisdom of the note ban decision.

In his statement, Tyagi strongly defended his innocence after he was arrested. He said he had simply followed orders from the PMO and that the decision to buy the Augusta Westland helicopters was a collective one.

Congress circles see this as an attempt to drag Manmohan Singh into the case as a pressure tactic to silence him on demonetization. They recall that something similar had happened in the early months of the present regime when suddenly the former PM became a target in the coal scam and there were threats to arrest him and make him appear in court as an accused. This followed Singh’s vocal critique of the government in its early months.

While this may be too much of a conspiracy theory, it is indeed curious that Tyagi was arrested without proper evidence, leading to a rap on the knuckles from the Supreme Court.