Election Results 2017: Who will be BJP's choice for chief minister in UP?

Modi’s Uttar Pradesh face

If Kalyan Singh became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s backward caste icon in the 1991 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh in the wake of the Mandal-Kamandal discourse, the party’s choice fell upon Keshav Prasad Maurya to fill that space for the 2017 polls.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha poll, the BJP found support among non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. For 2017, it went about consolidating this support by giving more representation to these castes, particularly the non-Yadav OBCs, in the leadership.

Maurya, a Lok Sabha member from Phulpur, was made the UP state unit