Minister Kaushal Kishore, who cautions women against live-ins, got into Modi govt in pre-polls caste balancing

His elevation, though, had surprised many in the state BJP unit, as the 63-year-old was one of the few party leaders who had questioned the handling of the second wave of the Covid pandemic by the Yogi Adityanath government in UP.

A day after Kishore lost his elder brother to the virus in April 2021, he had written to Adityanath, expressing concern over the state of affairs at two government hospitals in Lucknow — King George’s Medical University Hospital and Balrampur hospital.

Earlier, he had also made an appeal to allow the purchase of oxygen cylinders by patients who were undergoing treatment in home isolation.

Kishore belongs to the Pasi community, the second-largest Dalit group in the state, which has a strong presence especially in the Awadh region, from where the minister hails.

Kishore began his political career as an Independent MLA from Malihabad (SC-reserved seat) in 2002. In 2002-03, the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party government inducted him as an MoS. Later, he floated a political party, the Rashtrawadi Communist Party (RCP), and contested the 2004 Lok Sabha election from Mohanlalganj (SC-reserved seat) on its symbol, but lost.

In January 2014, he joined the BJP and promptly got the ticket for Lok Sabha polls from Mohanlalganj. This time, carried by the Modi wave, he won. The party later appointed him the UP president of its Scheduled Caste Morcha.

In the 2017 UP Assembly polls, Kishore managed a ticket for his wife Jai Devi from Malihabad seat in Lucknow district, and she won. Encouraged, he demanded a ticket for his son Vikas in the 2022 elections, but the party only agreed to a ticket for Jai Devi. She was elected again.

Kishore and Jai Devi run a campaign called “Abhiyaan Kaushal Ka” to create awareness among youth against drug addiction and to “rid society of drugs”. They started this campaign after they lost their son Akash Kishore (28) to drug addiction, in 2020.

“That’s when we realised that if an MP and an MLA could not save the life of their son, how could the common man cope with such a problem? So we launched this campaign. We hold programmes in schools and colleges of UP and other states, and request students to pledge that they will not take drugs,” Jai Devi has been quoted as saying.