If Kalyan Singh was the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP’s) OBC icon in the 1991 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in the wake of the Mandal-Kamandal discourse, the party’s choice fell upon Keshav Prasad Maurya to fill that space for the 2017 polls.
With BJP having clinched UP, Maurya could be in the running to be the chief minister.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP found support among non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in UP. For 2017, it went about consolidating this support by giving more representation to these castes, particularly the non-Yadav OBCs, in the party leadership.
Maurya, a Lok Sabha member from Phulpur, was made the UP BJP state unit chief in April 2016. Subsequently, the party appointed non-Yadav OBCs as chiefs of several of its district units. The objective was to consolidate castes like the Kushwaha, Kurmi, Shakya, Patel and others to compliment the BJP’s core support base among the upper castes in the state.
Maurya, 48, has been a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh volunteer and served in leadership roles in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in UP. He has also served as the regional president of BJP’s Backward Class cell in the Kashi region.
While there were murmurs in the party about criminal cases pending against Maurya, they were brushed aside.
Maurya hails from a humble background and says his life has been one of struggle. “I got inspired to do social service and educated myself during childhood while selling tea,” he says. This is a similarity he shares with Prime Minister Modi, who has spoken about how he sold tea as a child on several occasions, that Maurya wears on his sleeve.