The differences between Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya have bubbled to the surface.

At the BJP state working committee meeting on Sunday evening, Maurya said his condition was not much different from that of the party workers.

“Your and my pain is same,” Maurya was quoted as saying in his speech in the presence of BJP national president J.P. Nadda. “But the organisation is always bigger than the government. And my doors are open for BJP workers round the clock.”

Maurya’s statement assumes significance against the backdrop of complaints by BJP workers that the abandonment of cadres was the primary reason behind the loss of Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.

“It was very clear since 2017 that the ground-level party workers would be ignored. Bureaucrats became very powerful and they started misbehaving with BJP workers. There was nobody to listen to our complaints against government officers. We thought everything would be fine after a few years but the trend continued after 2022 when we won the second consecutive term in the state. The morale of the party workers was very low during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and they preferred to sit at home instead of campaigning for the party,” said a state-level leader of the BJP on the condition of anonymity.

The BJP had won 62 of the 80 parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2019 but the figure came down to 33 in 2024.

“Whatever Maurya said is true to a large extent. But the fact is that he also harbours the ambition to become the chief minister,” said the leader.

Maurya was the BJP state president when the party got the majority of seats in the 2017 Assembly elections. He was the most predictable choice for the chief minister’s post but the party decided to elevate Gorakhpur MP Adityanath and make Maurya the deputy chief minister. However, he lost the Assembly election from Sirathu in 2022 and was thrown out of the race for the chief minister’s post, but BJP leaders decided to let him continue as the deputy CM.

After Maurya’s speech, Adityanath praised his government and said: “We will continue with the policies of the party.”

However, he had a question for the party workers. “Why could the BJP workers not reply to the lies of the Opposition parties against us? We were sending good morning messages to each other on our smartphones but didn’t answer to the false campaign against the BJP.”

The Adityanath camp claims that some party workers try to coerce government officers to do illegal work but the chief minister is strictly against it. “Whatever seats we could win in the Lok Sabha elections was because of the honest image of Adityanath. There are many stories of altercations between Adityanath and Maurya but the chief minister never bows before pressure,” said a leader who is close to Adityanath.