Amid Talk of UP BJP Rift, Yogi Adityanath Takes Charge of Assembly Bypoll Preparations
Chief Minister’s Direct Involvement
In the wake of a disappointing performance in the Lok Sabha elections, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has taken the reins for the upcoming Assembly bypolls. With ten bypolls on the horizon due to MLAs being elected to Parliament, Adityanath is ensuring his administration is proactive in addressing constituents’ concerns and organizing effective campaigns.
Strategy and Assignments
Despite no official election dates being announced, Adityanath held a meeting at his residence in Lucknow on Wednesday. Notably absent were Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak, as well as senior BJP organizational leaders. Sources within the BJP explained that until dates are set, the focus remains on governance and resolving local issues, which is why only government ministers attended the meeting.
Ministers were assigned to specific constituencies to address grievances, improve booth management, and prepare for the elections. This groundwork aims to counter negative publicity through active intervention.
Internal Tensions and Statements
The meeting coincided with Maurya reiterating his stance that the party organization is more significant than the government, a comment perceived as a critique of Adityanath’s management style. These remarks highlight ongoing internal tensions within the UP BJP.
Key Focus Areas
The BJP is particularly focused on the Milkipur constituency, part of the Faizabad district, which they lost to the Samajwadi Party (SP) in the Lok Sabha polls. Winning this seat back is seen as crucial to recovering from the setback in Faizabad, a district that includes the significant city of Ayodhya. Agriculture Minister Surya Pratap Shahi and Minister of State for Health Mayankeshwar Sharan Singh have been tasked with securing this constituency.
Coalition Dynamics
Adityanath is also coordinating with the BJP’s alliance partners, the NISHAD Party and Apna Dal (Soneylal). NISHAD Party leader Sanjay Nishad has recently voiced concerns about government actions affecting the poor, aligning with Maurya’s statements about the party’s importance. Apna Dal (S) leader Anupriya Patel’s husband, Ashish Singh Patel, participated in the meeting, underscoring the coalition’s collaborative approach. Anupriya Patel recently raised concerns about the treatment of reserved seats in government recruitment, reflecting broader worries about shifting voter bases among Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
The Seats in Play
The ten Assembly seats facing bypolls are currently divided among various parties: five held by the SP, three by the BJP, and one each by the NISHAD Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). The upcoming bypolls are crucial for the BJP to strengthen its position and address internal dissent.
Conclusion
As Yogi Adityanath takes a hands-on approach to the Assembly bypoll preparations, the focus is on resolving local issues, strengthening the party’s grassroots presence, and ensuring a robust strategy to regain lost ground. The collaboration between the BJP and its allies will be pivotal in navigating the political landscape and addressing voter concerns in Uttar Pradesh.
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Two weeks ago, female wrestler Vinesh Phogat became the first woman from India to make the Olympic finals—and was promptly disqualified for being 100 grams overweight.
On August 9, Vinesh Phogat announced her retirement from the sport of wrestling in a post on X. After the previous day’s incidents, it was a message that many had been expecting.
Vinesh experienced the highest of highs at the Paris Olympics. She defeated an unbeaten Olympic champion wrestler who was considered not just the favourite in her weight division but across every weight division at the quadrennial event. She became the first Indian woman wrestler to reach an Olympic final. However, Vinesh also faced the lowest of lows at the Olympics. No one had ever reached an Olympic final only to be denied the chance to compete because they had failed to make weight on the day of the competition.
Vinesh had taken her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, seeking at least to be awarded a silver medal by virtue of reaching the final. If she had succeeded, she would have set a precedent, but, much to the disappointment of the nation, her appeal was turned down by the sole arbitrator, Annabelle Bennett.
...
Vinesh has always been a fighter. Tragedy has followed her, yet somehow, against the odds, she has emerged victorious.
When she was nine, her father was shot dead by someone in her village, believed to be a mentally disturbed relative, just outside their front door. Her mother, a young widow, refused the custom of marrying her husband’s brother. She battled cancer single-handedly. Through it all, she raised a firebrand daughter, who refused to back down.
Her cousins, who grew up near her home, were the more famous girls of the family. Geeta and Babita were among the first to win gold at the Commonwealth Games. They had a movie made about them — Dangal — which made the ‘Phogat sisters’ iconic in Indian sports.
Vinesh didn’t feature in that movie. The events described in it took place too early in her career. But she wouldn’t be satisfied with being one of the Phogat sisters — she would become ‘The Phogat’ sister.
Talk to any of her peers .— and even some of her rivals in Indian wrestling – and there is, in some cases, grudging, genuine respect. She is considered the most instinctive and natural wrestler India has ever produced in women’s freestyle wrestling.
Her career is as much a highlight reel as anything out of a movie. No one in women’s wrestling compares. No Indian woman wrestler has won three Commonwealth gold medals as she did in 2014, 2018, and 2022. No one has won an Asian Games gold medal as she did in 2018. No one has won two World Championships medals as she did in 2019 and 2022.
The one medal missing from her collection is the Olympic medal — which she fought bitterly for.
...
Vinesh has had terrible luck at the Olympics — the only competition that seems to matter to Indians. In 2016, she was one of the favourites in the Indian team before her knee was bent out of shape in the quarterfinals. In 2020, she was one of the world’s favourites to medal in the women’s 53kg weight class. Then, suddenly, a freak weight cut left her physically and psychologically broken, unable to coordinate her movements on the mat. She lost to a wrestler she had beaten comfortably just a month before. Now, in Paris, another poor weight cut left her at the lowest point of her wrestling career.
Her battles, though, haven’t been restricted to the mat. Perhaps the most significant one Vinesh has fought has been for the safety of young girls in the sport. In pursuing this fight, she took on one of the most powerful men in Indian sports — Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.
When her rivals were preparing for the Olympics, Vinesh was fighting on the streets of New Delhi, where she, and few other fellow wrestlers, accused Brij Bhushan, a five-time member of parliament and the long-time president of the Wrestling Federation, of sexual harassment.
The longer she stayed on the streets, the slimmer her chances on the mat became. Yet, she continued to prioritise what she felt was right. In doing so, Vinesh showed the kind of courage almost uniformly lacking in most sportspersons in India. Most of them, as the saying goes, “crawl when asked to bend.” Vinesh’s spine has been ramrod straight. She had the courage to take on the system without caring about the consequences. She displayed it even though it cost her what she loved the most — the chance to wrestle.
Only when her protest was forced off the streets and entered the court did Vinesh finally get a chance to compete.
This article delves into her struggle to rein in her weight as the Olympic timeline unfolded. It's horrifying to read.
TW for fatphobia and people with eating disorders and body dysmorphia: fatphobia:
Even as she had been winning, Vinesh’s nutritionist had been nervously monitoring her food and fluid intake.
She had a celebratory glass of juice in the morning right after she had first made weight – 300 grams. She had another couple of litres of fluid to rehydrate herself before her bout - another 2000 grams of body weight gained. A couple of light snacks throughout the day to keep her energy up meant 700 grams more.
By the time Vinesh was done with her day’s competition, she weighed 52.7 kg.
August 7:
As the hours rolled into the night, it was clear that something had gone very wrong. After weeks of dehydration, the human body, once it gets rehydrated, simply refuses to give up water. Even urination becomes impossible.
Vinesh didn’t sleep all through the night of August 6. She was on the treadmill for six hours and in the sauna for another three. She didn’t consume a bite of food or drink a drop of water. Every few hours, she stood on a weighing scale. The numbers were getting smaller but not fast enough. In desperation, her coaches trimmed the elastic in the bottom of her costume. They thought of chopping her hair and then did it.
But the scale didn’t budge.
The function of weight classes is to prevent outsized mismatches in strength due to body mass and minimize injury. Pathologizing what is clearly water weight to this extent and subjecting athletes to this kind of psychological torture due to minute variables is simply making what is essentially a safety measure into a punitive arbitrary criteria that has huge implications for racialized fatphobia for female athletes and the reinforcement of toxic diet culture across the board. It's misogynistic, unscientific and fucked. This article goes into more detail about Phogat's career-long battle with her weight— a yo-yo of losing too much, and then too little. Indistinguishable from an eating disorder, only one imposed by the standards of international sports.
You will never convince me that a white athlete would have been disqualified in the lightest weight category for a weight less than a bar of soap. The disqualification retroactively places her dead last, which is added cruelty. The refusal to revise this and even award her a joint silver is just adding racist insult to racist injury.
Phogat spoke two days ago about her devastation at being disqualified by racism and fatphobia with a three page post on twitter.
And on top of all of this, because the Indian National Congress political party welcomed her with a road show that outshone the alt-right BJP's own planned welcome, the Hindutvas in her own country have launched a hate campaign against her.
This copy-paste has "disqualified in Rio 2016" trending on twitter. It's doubly cruel and fatphobic because she wasn't disqualified for being overweight, she sustained a knee injury.
After the witch hunt against Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, I'm just so fucking done with the Olympics. The outsize importance of this competition is nothing but an anvil to break entire careers on and offers female athletes of colour on a platter for all the world's vultures.
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