BJP's counter to INDIA bloc in Uttar Pradesh: 6 yatras, 200 youth meets, farmer feasts

As the INDIA bloc marched to the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi to address a mega rally there to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the BJP has come up with a plan to organise six padyatras in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh from November 3 to 5 as part of a nationwide campaign against the Opposition's narrative.

Apart from the "Loktantra bachao, Arajakta hatao (Save democracy, remove anarchy)" protest marches -- BJP president Nitin Nabin led one in Rohtak, Haryana, on Sunday -- the party is also set to organise almost 200 Yuva Sammelans (youth meetings) and community feasts with farmers to expose the alleged "regime change agenda" of the Opposition and "misconceptions about the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls". The campaign's scale in UP is bigger than in the rest of the country.

The BJP finalised these programmes at its recent state executive committee meeting in Lucknow. The party's six regional units will organise the six padyatras. On November 3, the protest march in the Awadh region will be held in Lucknow and the Braj region's padyatra will be held in Bareilly. Union Ministers Shivraj Singh Chouhan and J P Nadda will lead the protest marches in Lucknow and Bareilly, respectively. The following day, padyatras will be held in Gorakhpur, for the Gorakhpur region, led by BJP president Nitin Nabin; Prayagraj, for the Kashi region, where Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya will lead the event; and Kanpur, for the Kanpur-Bundelkhand region, with Deputy CM Brajesh Pathak at the helm. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will lead the padyatra for West UP in Ghaziabad on November 5.

"These padyatras will be a reply to the Opposition's repeated protests," said a senior BJP leader. The party has set a target for the regional units to mobilise at least 25,000 people at each event, which will see leaders and workers walk at least one kilometre.

"The protests staged by the Cockroach Janta Party and the Opposition at Jantar Mantar and other parts of the national capital in recent days over the issues of the Election Commission had barely a crowd of 5,000. However, they presented it on social media like a referendum against the BJP-led NDA government. Likewise, the crowd at Ramlila Maidan is expected to be around 50,000. We will have a bigger crowd at the UP padyatras, which will prove that the majority of people support the BJP, its policies, and ideology," said a senior BJP functionary.

The UP yatras are significant as they come just a few months before the elections and the main Opposition alliance of the Samajwadi Party and the Congress is aggressively leading the campaign against the CEC and SIR in Delhi and Lucknow. BJP sources said similar padyatras would be later organised at the district level.

The counter-narrative

The BJP's publication Kamal Jyoti has prepared a four-page pamphlet on the alleged "misconceptions about the SIR" and these pamphlets were distributed to UP state executive committee members on October 30.

One of the "misconceptions" that the pamphlet mentions is that "only one person takes decisions in the Election Commission". "All the orders related to SIR were issued with the consensus of all three Election Commissioners," it reads.

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The pamphlet says another misconception is that "13 crore votes have been deleted". The names deleted were those that were identified because of absence, permanent shifting, death, or duplicate entry, it adds. "It does not mean removal of 13 crore names," reads the pamphlet, accusing the Congress of attempting to mislead people. "Why does the INDIA alliance want to keep duplicate and dead voters in the electoral rolls?" asks the party.

The third "misconception" the document mentions is that the "deletion of name from electoral roll leads to withdrawal of the facilities of ration, pension and passport".

The document mentions that 10 of 12 SIR exercises were carried out during the tenure of Congress-led governments and that before the current exercise, the Opposition party lost 56 Assembly elections between 2014 and 2025. The pamphlet also mentions that the Congress won the election in Keralam this year after the SIR exercise was conducted.