Why BJP's Rajya Sabha list for Uttar Pradesh is all about 2027 polls

When the BJP's candidates for Rajya Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh finally came out, the first thing that was noticed was who all weren't in the list. Hardeep Singh Puri, a Union cabinet minister, was missing. So was his ministerial colleague B.L. Verma. Arun Singh, Seema Dwivedi, Neeraj Shekhar, Brij Lal and Geeta Shakya had all been dropped too.

The eighth outgoing Rajya Sabha member, Dinesh Sharma, had already resigned from his Rajya Sabha seat in September and has since been sworn in as the lieutenant governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. So, not one of the eight is coming back.

In their place, the BJP has picked Dharampal Singh, Radhakant Ojha, Prakash Pal, Vidyasagar Sonkar, Gopi Krishna Pandey, Priyanka Singh Rawat, Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan and Shruti Gangwar. Few of these names are known outside UP, and that was the strategic intention.

Over the next few days, the party will present the list as an exercise in inclusion. It has three OBCs: a Lodh, a Pal and a Kurmi. There are two Dalits, two Brahmins and a Rajput. Two of the eight are women. That description is accurate as far as it goes, but it misses most of what the list is doing.

Compare the outgoing eight with the incoming eight and the overlap is striking. Two Brahmins, Dwivedi and Sharma, make way for two Brahmins, Ojha and Pandey. Two women leave and two women arrive. The Lodh seat stays with a Lodh. Verma's place goes to Dharampal Singh, the five-time MLA from Aonla and animal husbandry and dairy development minister in the Yogi Adityanath government. That choice is telling in itself.

What else has moved is more interesting. Shruti Gangwar, daughter of the veteran Bareilly leader Santosh Gangwar, brings a Kurmi face from Rohilkhand. Prakash Pal, who heads the BJP's state OBC Morcha, represents the Pal community. A second Dalit seat has been added. In return, the party has given up one of its two Thakur seats, its Shakya representative, and Puri, its only nationally known name.

None of this is accidental. Kurmis and smaller backward communities, such as the Pals, were where Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav's PDA (Picchda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) pitch hurt the BJP the most in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, and the party is going after them directly. Dropping Geeta Shakya is the riskier call. The Shakya-Maurya-Kushwaha vote across central UP is not one the BJP can take for granted, and party leaders there will want to know why it lost its seat.

There is a geographical pattern too. Two of the eight, Dharampal Singh and Shruti Gangwar, come from Bareilly district. Add Chauhan's western UP charge and the list leans heavily towards Rohilkhand and the west, where the SP made deep inroads in 2024. The party seems to have decided that this belt needs the most attention.

The Thakur cut has been handled more carefully. Ram Pratap Singh Chauhan, the only Rajput on the list, was given charge of the party's western UP region only in August. That is the part of the state where Thakur anger over ticket distribution broke out into the open before the last general election, and sending him to Delhi is meant to do the work that two Thakur MPs did before.

Dharampal Singh's move has a consequence in Lucknow as well. Once he is elected, he will have to give up the Aonla seat, and in practice his place in the state cabinet. The present legislative assembly's term ends on May 22, 2027, so barely seven months will remain when the seat falls vacant. That is well inside the one-year threshold below which the Election Commission (EC) is not required to hold a by-election. The BJP gets a sitting MLA without having to defend Aonla in a by-election, and Yogi Adityanath's council of ministers gains a vacancy just as the party begins to arrange its pieces for the state election.

The list is also notable for whom it leaves out. Neither Dalit nominee is a Jatav. Priyanka Singh Rawat, who won Barabanki in 2014, is a Pasi, the state's second-largest Dalit community and concentrated in Awadh. Vidyasagar Sonkar, a former Lok Sabha MP, is a veteran of the party's Dalit outreach. Both picks are consistent with the BJP's long preference for non-Jatav Dalits.

What makes the choice notable now is the state of affairs of Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The BSP has no Lok Sabha MP; it lost its only UP MLA when Umashankar Singh died in August; its lone Rajya Sabha member Ramji Gautam retires in November. For the first time in more than three decades, the Jatav vote looks genuinely up for grabs, yet the BJP has not used these eight seats to compete for it.

There is no Jat either. Sanjeev Balyan's name had been on the state panel specifically with western UP's Jats in mind, and it was dropped. The BJP appears content to leave that community to its ally, the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).

The allies themselves have got nothing. Apna Dal, Om Prakash Rajbhar's Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), the RLD and Nishad Party will all head into an election year without a single Rajya Sabha seat from this round. That is likely to matter on October 16 because the BJP could easily have avoided a contest but chose not to.

A candidate needs around 37 votes to win. On the numbers, the SP cannot win a third seat on its own, and the BJP cannot win an eighth without help from outside its committed tally. By one estimate, the BJP is short by just four votes. Once the MLAs who rebelled at the last Rajya Sabha election are left out, the SP has 99 (Congress included), and needs nine more for a third seat.

Putting up eight candidates means the BJP intends to find those votes somewhere, and the last time it did. In February 2024, Sanjay Seth, the party's eighth candidate, was elected with 43 votes. He was helped by SP legislators who cross-voted and by support from the BSP, RLD, SBSP and Raja Bhaiya.

Akhilesh has not forgotten that day. This time, his party has reportedly been approaching unhappy NDA (National Democratic Alliance) legislators -- the SBSP is among them. With BJP allies given nothing, those conversations will be easier to have.

So October 16 is less a ballot for eight berths than a test of whether either side can hold its own MLAs. If the BJP wins eight, it enters the UP election campaign of 2027 having shown once more that SP legislators can be prised away. If the SP holds firm and picks up a few votes from the NDA side, the conversation shifts to cracks in the ruling alliance, just months before the state votes to elect a new government.

The SP's own choices make the contrast hard to miss. It has named Ram Gopal Yadav, its general secretary and Akhilesh's uncle, and Dhanraj Parimal Nathwani, a Gujarat-based businessman whose nomination surprised even many in the party. The party that built its comeback around the PDA slogan has sent a Yadav and a corporate outsider. The BJP, by contrast, has sent eight people from UP, most of them from backward or Dalit communities. Laid side by side, the BJP's list fits the PDA formula better than the SP's, and BJP speakers are likely to say so on the campaign trail.

It is tempting to read all this as Delhi BJP handing the state unit a freer hand. The way the list was put together suggests something more complicated. Around 20 names were discussed at the core committee meeting chaired by Adityanath. The state unit then forwarded a longer list of probables that included Smriti Irani, Hardeep Puri, Sanjeev Balyan and former AAP leader Kumar Vishwas. Every one of the big names got dropped somewhere between Lucknow and Delhi.

The eight who survived have little standing of their own and owe their elevation to whoever finally picked them. That fits a story of state-level management, but it fits equally well with the central leadership's longstanding habit of promoting people who owe their rise to it. Dharampal Singh's case can be read either way. Moving a senior minister from Adityanath's cabinet to the Rajya Sabha could be a reward for long service or a way of thinning the chief minister's team before the election. Which reading holds will become clearer once it is known whose camp each of the eight belongs to: the chief minister's, the organisation's or one of the deputy chief ministers'. In Lucknow, that is already the more closely followed question.

What is less ambiguous is the message to party workers. Prakash Pal runs the OBC Morcha, Chauhan runs a region, Pandey comes out of the Kisan Morcha, and Ojha, a former president of the Allahabad High Court Bar Association, has longstanding RSS links. The party has spent this year redrawing its six organisational regions and rebuilding its booth network. Now it is telling the people doing that work that this could take them to Parliament. Voters seldom remember who their Rajya Sabha MPs are, but party workers keep careful track of who got tickets.

Puri's omission also fits a pattern that has been building through Prime Minister Narendra Modi's third term. In June, when the BJP named candidates for 24 Rajya Sabha seats across 10 states, it left out two ministers of state whose terms were ending: Ravneet Singh Bittu from Rajasthan and George Kurian from Madhya Pradesh. Kurian, the only Christian in the council of ministers, resigned two days after his term lapsed on June 21. Bittu stayed on for another month under the six-month window the Constitution allows a minister who is not an MP, then resigned on July 24. The party let it be known that it wanted him back in Punjab ahead of next year's Assembly election. The next day, Dharmendra Pradhan quit as education minister over the NEET-UG paper leak.

Puri's Rajya Sabha term ends on November 25. Unless the party finds him a seat from another state, he looks set to become the second cabinet minister to leave Modi government 3.0, after Pradhan. The circumstances could hardly be more different. Pradhan went under the pressure of weeks of student protests. Puri would go because his party chose not to keep the door open for him. This year's precedents suggest it does not wait long once that choice is made: Kurian left within two days, Bittu within a month. B.L. Verma, a minister of state, faces the same arithmetic.

There is a Punjab angle that Delhi will not have missed. Puri and Bittu were the only two Sikhs in the Union cabinet sworn in on June 9, 2024. Since Bittu's exit, Puri has been the government's sole Sikh minister. If he goes too, the Union government will head into the Punjab election with no Sikh face in the cabinet at all. Whether that is an oversight or a calculation, the party will be asked about it.

There is reason, too, for scepticism about the electoral pay-off in UP. The BJP has tried this before. Its 2024 Rajya Sabha list from UP was just as carefully balanced, with R.P.N. Singh presented as a Kurmi face, along with Amarpal Maurya, Sangeeta Balwant and others. A few months later, the party lost heavily in the state's Lok Sabha contest, Kurmi-dominated seats included. Even the wholesale churn has a precedent: in 2024, the BJP denied a second term to every outgoing UP member except Sudhanshu Trivedi, and in June this year it dropped every sitting MP in the states that went to the polls. What sets this round apart is that the churn has reached the cabinets, both in Delhi and Lucknow.

For now, the October 6 nomination deadline will show whether the SP actually fields a third candidate. After that, attention moves to the first-preference votes and to whether every ally MLA turns up and votes the way the BJP expects. The eight names were chosen with the electorate of early 2027 in mind, but the first test of the strategy comes on October 16, and it depends on about 400 MLAs.