Sunil Bansal has good reason to cheer the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) performance in Uttar Pradesh, where it was leading in 293 seats as at 11.40 am on Saturday.
In June 2013, when the BJP announced Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Modi handpicked Amit Shah to focus on the 80 Lok Sabha seats of Uttar Pradesh. In turn, Shah discovered Bansal, a former Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad activist from Rajasthan, to be his eyes and ears in the state.
Shah and Bansal’s hard work yielded BJP, along with ally Apna Dal, 73 of the 80-seats in India’s most populous state. That victory paved the way for Shah to become the national president of the party. Within days, Bansal was appointed to the key post of joint general secretary (organisation) in the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh unit.
It was recognition that Bansal would be the BJP’s key strategist for the UP Assembly polls of 2017. Since then, the 47-year-old, in his usual unobtrusive way, has worked from his office on the first floor at the BJP headquarters in Lucknow with the twin agenda of keeping the cadre galvanised and expanding the party’s social base. He has also been the link between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP state unit.
The BJP’s strategy has been to reach out to non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBC castes. The party’s leadership in the districts, and the distribution of party tickets, reflected this changed social character of the BJP.
This was resented among its predominantly upper caste leadership, but Bansal was unrelenting in pushing the state BJP unit in organising regional meetings of booth-level workers and increasing the party’s engagements with Dalits, OBCs, women and youth.
The response to the Dalit outreach was lukewarm, and the Yadav family feud increased Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav's chances manifold. However, party sources said that Bansal, with his ears to the ground, reacted quickly to these emerging trends, including junking references to the prime minister's demonetisation drive in the party’s election campaigning.