You don’t have to vote for the BJP even if I ask you to: Uma Bharti to Lodhi voters

The latest statement comes at a time when the 2023 Assembly elections are on the horizon.

BJP leader Uma Bharti has said that members of the Lodhi community – a numerically significant backward caste and a key vote bank for the BJP – were free to vote for any party that served their interest.

The latest statement from Ms. Bharti – a former Chief Minister sidelined by the party organisation in Madhya Pradesh – comes at a time when the 2023 Assembly elections are on the horizon.

In a video from a Lodhi community event Ms. Bharti was addressing in Bhopal, she is heard telling her audience that they made an impact in 50 Assembly seats, decisively in 27 of those, and that they should look out for their own interests even if she herself asks for their votes (during the election campaign).

“I tell everyone to vote for BJP as I am a loyal soldier of my party. I would not expect from you that you will be a loyal soldier of the party. You have to look around yourself, your own interests. If you are not a party worker, you have to decide about yourself. Remember, we are bound by love, but you are free from such bonds...,” she said addressing the participants of a Lodhi Yuvak Yuvati Parichay Sammelan (convention of marriageable youth) on December 25. The video went viral late on Tuesday evening.

Ms. Bharti also alleged that while the BJP kept her away from publicity rest of the times, it used her name to seek votes [from the Lodhi community]. “Usually, they never show my picture, but during elections it would surely be displayed. The same is the condition with [late] Kalyan Singhji [former UP CM who also was from the Lodhi community] … This wins your hearts, you feel that you will follow your leader but no…,” said Ms. Bharti, even as she described herself as a committed party worker.

The former CM also brought up her uneasy history with the BJP and recalled that when she had floated her own party [in 2006], it was because she was expelled from the BJP. “Mind it that I was expelled from the BJP. It [the expulsion] was perhaps part of a design to first get a government elected in [my name] and then remove her as no one else had the status to get a government elected,” she said.

Ms. Bharti has often spoken against her party and government, mainly on the issue of liquor prohibition. In September, her relative and close aide Pritam Lodhi was expelled from the BJP and has been trying to project himself as a Lodhi leader ever since. In October, she had said that regional and caste imbalances in MP might lead to conflict.