Lucknow: Many were taken by surprise when Yogi Adityanath was chosen as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh but he has quickly become the go-to man in the BJP when it comes to election campaigning.
Yogi’s crowd pulling capacity has endeared him to the BJP, RSS cadre. The popularity of the UP CM could be gauged by the fact that his popularity ratings were second only to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in internal surveys by the party.
With his firebrand image, Yogi is the ideal figure to reach out to BJP’s traditional voters in upcoming Assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. As the BJP’s vikas model is under attack by the Congress, Yogi is being pitched to keep traditional (Hindu) voters in good humour.
He had already held a roadshow in Kerala and addressed a gathering of party workers in Gujarat earlier this month. Sources said Yogi will be a star campaigner in Gujarat and the BJP wants to pursue an aggressive Hindutva pitch in these polls.
Many in the party think that people outside Uttar Pradesh want to know more about Adityanath, and that has created a demand for him during campaigning. There is a large workforce in Gujarat that is from eastern Uttar Pradesh and the BJP plans to woo them by using the Yogi card.
Apart from CM Yogi, other UP ministers will also be asked to campaign in areas with considerable Hindi-speaking population. Deputy Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Dinesh Sharma is one of them.
Yogi had also joined BJP chief Amit Shah during his ‘Jan Raksha Yatra’ to protest the killing of RSS-BJP workers in Kerala.
Yogi has also been included in the BJP list of star campaigners for the Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections. PM Modi will also be roped in for campaigning in Himachal along with Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari, Sushma Swaraj, J P Nadda, Thawar Chand Gehlot, Smriti Irani, Uma Bharti, Vijay Sampla and V K Singh.
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