‘Elections not won on strength of govt’: Keshav Maurya’s fresh remark amid UP BJP rift buzz.

There have been reports of a purported rift between UP deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya and chief minister Yogi Adityanath.Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya on Monday made another cryptic remark on ‘party vs government’ amid reports of infighting within the state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit.“BJP is the present and the future….This time (in Lok Sabha elections) we might have missed but next time we will come back stronger…The hard work we should have done, we missed because we got caught up in overconfidence, but I will say that elections are not won on the strength of the government, it is the party that contests the elections and it is the party that wins the elections…Therefore we have to come stronger in 2027,” ANI quoted Maurya as saying.There have been reports of a purported rift between Maurya and chief minister Yogi Adityanath. On July 17, a cryptic X post by the deputy CM’s office had created flutter in the political circles.“The organization is bigger than the government, the pain of the workers is my pain. No one is bigger than the organization, the workers are the pride,” Maurya’s office had said.Maurya is currently serving his second term as the Deputy CM of Uttar Pradesh. In 2017, he was the state BJP President when the BJP formed the majority government under CM Yogi Adityanth with 312 seats in the Assembly.In the 2022 elections, Maurya lost the Assembly election but continued in his position as Deputy CM along with Brijesh Pathak, he was later elected to the Legislative Council.The BJP won 33 seats in the Lok Sabha polls 2024, down from 62 it had won out of the total 80 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general elections.“The percentage of votes that were in favour of BJP in 2014 and subsequent elections, BJP has been successful in getting the same number of votes in 2024 as well, but the shifting of votes and overconfidence have hurt our expectations. The opposition, which had earlier accepted defeat and sat down, is again jumping and dancing today,” ANI had quoted Adityanath as saying.