The fault lines between the BJP and its Brahmin supporters in the Hindi heartland are widening, which the saffron party can only ignore at its peril. The growing rift has been evident in the outrage over the killing of Bharat Bhushan Tiwari in a police encounter in Bihar’s Bhojpur district on June 17, which spiralled into a caste debate; protests over the denial of a byelection ticket to Narottam Mishra in Madhya Pradesh; and the political get-togethers of Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh, where many community leaders have voiced unhappiness over how they are being treated.
These developments, coming barely six to eight months before the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, have created a tough challenge for the BJP, which is aware that its privileged-caste constituency is restive, especially after the recent uproar against the saffron party over the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, which recommended strict measures to check and punish caste discrimination on university campuses.
While Brahmins account for 10-12 per cent of the total electorate in Uttar Pradesh, their corresponding share in Madhya Pradesh is 5-6 per cent, and in Bihar it is 3.65 per cent, the largest within the general category in the State.
“We are the ones who stood behind the BJP like a solid rock. Who built the party in Bihar? Leaders like Tarakant Jha, Vinod Naryan Jha, Gopal Jee Thakur, Ashwini Choubey, and Mithilesh Tiwari stood with the party through thick and thin. And now we are being fired at,” a BJP leader from the Brahmin community said on condition of anonymity, reflecting the angst within the community over Bharat Tiwari’s killing and the overall feeling of neglect of Brahmins in the party. Bharat Bhushan Tiwari of Bilauti village in Bhojpur district was killed in a police encounter on the morning of June 17. Outrage over the issue soon assumed a caste colour, with some people saying he was killed because he was a “Tiwari” (denoting Brahmin). At the same time, a few people, including a Union Minister from the State, wondered why similar rage is not expressed when people from Dalit and Muslim communities are killed.
OBC outreach
This year the BJP anointed its first Chief Minister in Bihar, Samrat Choudhary—who belongs to the Kushwaha caste (part of the Other Backward Classes, or OBCs)—after Nitish Kumar, leader of the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), announced his retirement from State politics, quitting as Chief Minister after more than two decades and accepting a Rajya Sabha nomination.
Nitish Kumar had performed a fine balancing act as the head of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the State, keeping both OBC and Dalit voters, as well as general category voters (who mainly voted for the BJP), happy. The BJP-JD(U) coalition in Bihar was not just a political arrangement; over the years it had transformed into a seamless social coalition.
On May 7, within a month of Choudhary taking oath as Chief Minister, senior BJP leader Mithilesh Tiwari, a prominent Brahmin leader, was made the State’s Education Minister, while former Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra’s son Nitish Mishra was made Minister of Urban Development and Housing Department.
As the reaction over Bharat Tiwari’s killing threatened to rip apart the NDA’s constituency of Brahmin supporters, Nitish Kumar made unusually strong comments condemning the trend of extrajudicial killings, trying to ensure that the government was not seen as anti-Brahmin. Also, old videos resurfaced on social media of Choudhary saying: “Brahmins were superior yesterday and are superior today, and Bihar will run under your guidance.” Clearly, the BJP will do everything it can to keep its traditional voter base intact.
Trouble in Madhya Pradesh
Meanwhile, in Madhya Pradesh, thousands of supporters of Narottam Mishra clashed with the police on July 11 in Datia district after the former Minister was denied a ticket for the July 30 Datia byelection. They blocked NH-44 for nearly 12 hours in protest. This happened after the BJP announced Ashutosh Tiwari’s candidature for the byelection, ignoring claims by Mishra, a senior Brahmin leader of the party who has often in the past stoked controversy with his remarks.
While Tiwari is a debutant in this election, Mishra is a three-term MLA from Datia. A fourth win would have placed him as a serious contender for a senior position in the State Cabinet. Tiwari was considered close to former Chief Minister Uma Bharti, a prominent OBC leader and the Hindutva face of the 1990s.
Mishra later visited New Delhi, where he reportedly met party president Nitin Nabin and accepted the decision. Before the reconciliation, senior leaders such as Madhya Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Jagdish Devda and Mahendra Singh, the BJP in-charge for the State, visited Datia and met with Tiwari.
There were reports of Mishra’s run-ins with senior State party leaders. In Mishra’s refusal to blame anyone, this was more than apparent. “No, I don’t blame the organisation, nor do I blame the Chief Minister. I do not point fingers at anyone. I believe that there must have been some shortcoming on my part. I will introspect and improve myself,” he said after the reconciliation.
This happened despite Tiwari having earlier said: “Mishra is a very senior leader, my guardian, and he said he will campaign for the party and me.”
Mishra lost the seat to the Congress’ Rajendra Bharti in the 2023 Assembly election. The byelection was necessitated after Bharti’s legislative membership was cancelled in April 2026 following his conviction in a 2015 bank fraud case. Mishra was considered the natural choice for the BJP.
After winning the 2023 election in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP sprang a surprise by appointing the relatively less-known Mohan Yadav as Chief Minister as part of its outreach to OBCs, ignoring the claims of many seniors, including Narottam Mishra.
Earlier in July, an ongoing power tussle between Chief Minister Yadav and Urban Development and Housing and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya, currently the most prominent Brahmin leader within the party, reached a new level after a letter written by him to the Chief Minister became public. In the letter he alleged that officials in the departments headed by him were being transferred without his knowledge and that over the past two and a half years, he had received only non-cooperation, neglect, and opposition.
Vijayvargiya, an MLA from Indore, was among the top contenders for the Chief Minister’s post when the BJP considered replacing Shivraj Singh Chouhan as Chief Minister after the 2023 election. Mohan Yadav represents the Ujjain South Assembly seat, close to Indore, which is considered the financial capital of Madhya Pradesh.
The Shankaracharya of Jyotish Peeth, Swami Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, and his followers on a protest after he was reportedly stopped by the police from taking a dip in the Ganga, in Prayagraj, on January 27.
| Photo Credit:
RAJESH KUMAR SINGH/AP
The tussle is reportedly for turf control as both Mohan Yadav and Vijayvargiya hail from the same region. In June this year, reports emerged that the Chief Minister’s family members had bought plots in Ujjain in zones benefiting from the proposed infrastructure push in the region under the Ujjain Master Plan 2035.
Backlash in Uttar Pradesh
But the biggest Brahmin backlash that the BJP is facing is in election-bound Uttar Pradesh, where keeping the community in good humour, given the old Thakur-versus-Brahmin rivalry, especially in eastern Uttar Pradesh (known as Purvanchal), is a tightrope walk.
In January this year, a Provincial Civil Service officer in Uttar Pradesh named Alankar Agnihotri, who was then posted as Bareilly City Magistrate, had publicly protested by putting out a photograph of himself with a poster that termed the UGC equity regulations as a “Black Law” and demanded their withdrawal. He had expressed apprehension that they would lead to harassment of general category students.
His poster also condemned the “insult” to Swami Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Jyotish Peeth, at the Maagh Mela in Prayagraj in January this year and called for boycotting the BJP, alleging that an “anti-Brahmin campaign” was going on in the Uttar Pradesh government. Charging him with “indiscipline and defying service rules”, the government suspended him hours after he announced his resignation.
On December 23 last year, a group of disgruntled Brahmin MLAs and MLCs of the BJP held a meeting in Lucknow at the house of senior party leader Panchanand Pathak, shortly after the party appointed Pankaj Chaudhary, from an OBC community, as its State president.
(The show of strength came six months after a meeting of 40 Thakur MLAs in Lucknow in August that year.)
This gave Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Akhilesh Yadav an opportunity to fish in troubled waters. He said the BJP does not respect the tilak (the mark on the forehead worn by Brahmins) and, provoking the Brahmins, added that a self-respecting society always chooses honour over power. Akhilesh Yadav has maintained that his party has always honoured the Brahmin community and has attended Brahmin conferences.
BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak has, of late, been meeting influential members of the Brahmin community in the State as the party seeks to address their grievances.
In Uttar Pradesh, Brahmins are not only voters but also influencers, shaping the political opinions of many others. When the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) came to power with a massive majority in 2007, the party, in the run-up to the election, had made a huge outreach to the community, organising Brahmin Bhaichara Sammelans and coining slogans such as “Brahman shankh bajayega, Haathi badhta jaayega [Brahmins will blow the conch and the elephant (the BSP’s symbol) will march ahead].”
In the past, Uttar Pradesh has seen many prominent Brahmin leaders as Chief Ministers, including Govind Ballabh Pant, Kamlapati Tripathi, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, Sripati Mishra, and Narayan Dutt Tiwari. Most of them were from the Congress. After the era of Mandal-Mandir politics, Brahmins moved lock, stock, and barrel to the BJP as the Congress went into a terminal decline. Since then, there have been Chief Ministers from the Thakur, Vaishya, OBC, and Dalit communities, but none from the Brahmin community in the last 37 years.
Sharat Pradhan, a Lucknow-based political analyst and author, said that the primary reason for the visible disillusionment among Brahmins with the BJP in Uttar Pradesh was the growing perception of Chief Minister Adityanath government’s “thakurvaad”, marked by domination of Thakurs.
Speaking to Frontline, he said: “This got compounded with the gunning down of some Brahmin criminals, the most infamous of them all being Vikas Dubey, whose killing was seen as part of a deliberate design. Even though Dubey never enjoyed that kind of popularity with the Brahmin community, the shabbily carried out encounter by the Uttar Pradesh police aroused sympathy from the community.”
Dubey’s encounter took place in 2020, and the BJP was able to address and contain much of the Brahmins’ anger before the 2022 Assembly election, which it won for the second consecutive time. Pradhan said that since Brahmins remained the “privileged” section in successive regimes, they could not digest the emergence of Thakurs as the ruling dispensation’s blue-eyed boys, particularly their holding key positions in the police force, which is considered a yardstick of clout enjoyed by communities in a caste-ridden State.
“While Thakurs and Brahmins have traditionally been at loggerheads in UP politics, the battle lines were never as sharply drawn as they appear today,” Pradhan said.
The BJP’s biggest challenge in Uttar Pradesh is countering the SP’s Pichchda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak pitch by reaching out to backward sections, Dalits, and minorities even while keeping its Brahmin, baniya, and other privileged-caste votes intact.
“Neglect of Brahmins”
The neglect of Brahmins in the Adityanath administration is a common refrain among Brahmin legislators. Sanjay Pandey, a Lucknow-based senior journalist who has tracked the State’s politics for nearly three decades, said: “There seems to be a perceptible anger in the Brahmin community against the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh. I think the anger stems from several factors. Brahmins, in general, feel marginalised under the Adityanath government.”
He added: “Humiliation of Shankaracharya Avimukteshwaranand and mistreatment of batuks [young Brahmin students studying in gurukulas] by the police only accentuated the resentment. The way the batuks were dragged by their shikha [tufts] added to their anger.” He also pointed out to Alankar Agnihotri’s resignation as an event that reflected this anger.
“Deputy Chief Minister Brijesh Pathak was forced to perform a batuk puja with 101 batuks, apparently in a damage control exercise. The community was also peeved by the new UGC regulations. At the meeting of the Brahmin MLAs of the BJP, many legislators said that their community members were being insulted and that the administration turned a blind eye to their concerns,” Pandey added.
According to Pandey, Bharat Tiwari’s encounter killing in Bihar may hurt the BJP’s chances in the border districts in Uttar Pradesh such as Ballia, Deoria, and Ghazipur, but the denial of the ticket to Narottam Mishra in Madhya Pradesh will not have any impact in the election-bound State, where the SP and the Congress fancy their chances and will go the extra mile to deny the BJP a third successive term.
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