‘Gujarat, Himachal results have made it clear that anti-incumbency can be turned into pro-incumbency by giving a new look to the team that works for the party’.
NEW DELHI: The result of the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh polls are going to make an impact in Madhya Pradesh where elections are due less than a year away. The ruling BJP, which has been in power in the state since December 2003, except for a brief period from December 2018 till March 2020, when the Congress was in power, will be repeating the Gujarat model—of executing widespread changes—in Madhya Pradesh.
In Gujarat, the party decided to drop more than 40 of its sitting MLAs which included stalwart like outgoing Assembly Speaker Nimaben Acharya, Cabinet Ministers Pradip Parmar, Rajendra Trivedi, Bhupendra Singh Chudasama, Pardeep Singh Jadeja, Nitin Patel and former CM Vijay Rupani. The party had won 99 seats in the 2017 polls. This decision, as the result showed on Thursday, gave high dividends, as the BJP for the first time in Gujarat’s electoral history, crossed 150 seats in the 182 Assembly seat and went on to win 156 seats with a vote share of 52.50%.
The step to drop big names and more than 40 sitting MLAs was taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home minister Amit Shah with the sole reason of blunting the anti-incumbency that had come to be associated with the BJP because of the fact that it has been in power in the state for 27 years now.
The party even replaced former Chief Minister Vijay Rupani in September and appointed the incumbent Bhupendra Bhai Patel in a political move that caught even Rupani by surprise. This too, party sources had told The Sunday Guardian at that time, was done to enter the upcoming elections without any “baggage”. Rupani was accused by his detractors of failing to handle the pandemic as efficiently as the state government had the capability to.
When the elections take place in Madhya Pradesh in 2023, the BJP would have been in power for almost 19 years out of which incumbent Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has been in power for more than 16 years. It was the massive anti-incumbency against this almost two-decade-rule comprising the same faces, the same policies and the same slogans that led to BJP losing the 2018 polls. The party went to polls after winning 165 seats in the 2013 November polls, but lost 56 of them in the 2018 polls with a decrease of around 4% vote share. In that election, the BJP had dropped at least 47 sitting MLAs.
“The results of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh have made it clear that anti-incumbency can be turned into pro-incumbency by giving a new look to the team that works for the party. In Gujarat, we brought big changes, including changing the CM. In Himachal Pradesh, due to multiple internal reasons, we could not make the kind of changes that we ideally should have. These two elections have given us many inputs that we will be applying in the coming polls, especially in Madhya Pradesh where we are in a weak position as the surveys are indicating,” a central party functionary told The Sunday Guardian on Thursday evening.
BJP Madhya Pradesh in-charge P. Muralidhar Rao, after listening to The Sunday Guardian’s queries seeking whether the formula applied in Gujarat—of changing the CM and dropping cabinet ministers—will be applied to Madhya Pradesh, disconnected the call and chose not to respond to the messages sent later on Friday.
It is not that the Central BJP is unaware of the problems being faced by the party in the state. On 1 October, 20 BJP national functionaries, state leaders and Union ministers indulged in a marathon nine-hour “core group” interaction at a resort situated inside the Ratapani forest sanctuary to have a frank discussion among the central functionaries and state leaders in view of the challenges that the BJP was facing in Madhya Pradesh which will start poll preparations this time next year. The meeting was presided by National General Secretary (Organization) B.L. Santhosh, the de-facto number three in the BJP’s hierarchy. Among other issues, the topic of alleged corruption in state departments too was discussed.
The said meeting, sources said, was held after feedback that was sent by Ajay Jamwal, zonal General Secretary Organization (Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh), regarding the situation in Madhya Pradesh, was received by the party office in Delhi. In the interaction, Santhosh spoke “freely” and gave specific details that he had gathered about wrongdoings in the state administration while speaking about how these activities can and have impacted the party’s electoral performance in the past, notably in the recently held civic elections where the party lost mayor posts in crucial cities and the 2018 polls in which the BJP lost.
“The bureaucracy is running the administration in the state. Serving and retired officials, due to a two-decade unchanged leadership, have gained proximity to the state party leadership and it is they who are taking all major decision and executing it. This is a normal phenomenon and is seen in states where the political power head is not changed at a regular interval. The legislative needs a set of trusted executive to run the state, and over time, the politicians become too dependent on the IAS officers to do basic things. Similarly, the babus too would like that the status quo does not change as far as the Chief Minister is concerned for obvious reasons,” a professor with a national level education institution based in Bhopal said.
However, what may likely save Chouhan from meeting the same electoral fate which was experienced by Rupani is that Chouhan, in what can be described as a far-sighted political move, has ensured “OBC” identity politics becomes a pivotal part of the state’s politics. Chouhan comes from the Kirar community, which is recognized as an OBC. Madhya Pradesh, since the time of its first Chief Minister, Ravi Shankar Shukla, has seen multiple CMs from the forward caste and caste identity politics till the early 2000 was never a prominent issue in the state at the macro level.
Chouhan’s predecessor, Uma Bharti, belongs to the Lodhi-Rajput community that is classified as OBC. Her stop gap replacement for a few days, Babu Lal Gaur, too was an OBC. Bharti had come to power after defeating the Congress government headed by Digvijaya Singh (a forward class Rajput). And the last BJP CM of Madhya Pradesh before Bharti was Sunderlal Patwa, who was from the Baniya caste.
“People forget that Bharti was given the CM chair because of her popularity, track record and her charisma and not just because she belonged to OBC. It is a different matter that now whenever the question of changing the CM comes, voices within the system who are close to the present CM raise the topic of his OBC credentials,” a veteran Bhopal-based journalist recalled.
As per the 2011 census, OBC constitutes almost 51% of the state’s total population and Chouhan has been able to project himself as the biggest OBC leader in the state, both within the BJP and the Congress.
“Ideally, to replace Chouhan, the BJP will need to find a Madhya Pradesh-based OBC leader, which they do not have as of now. However, with the kind of decisions being taken by the party leadership in recent months (of replacing sitting CMs), it should not come as a surprise if the state gets a new Chief Minister before the elections are announced. The leadership can easily move away from the idea of having a CM from only the numerically dominant caste as it has done in the past in the case of Haryana and Jharkhand. Two decades (referring to Chouhan’s tenure as CM which has also made him the longest serving BJP CM) of being the Chief Minister is a long time and it cannot keep going on, it is not healthy for the party in the long run too. If he is not replaced before the elections, and the BJP wins in 2023, there is nothing to suggest that he will be given another term as the CM. The leadership has already moved him away from the Parliamentary board which in itself is enough to understand how the party will chart its path ahead in the coming days as far as Madhya Pradesh politics is concerned,” a former BJP Rajya Sabha member with a responsibility of a state told The Sunday Guardian.
According to him, if the party had even won in Himachal Pradesh, it was pre-decided that the incumbent Chief Minister, Jai Ram Thakur, would be replaced by another leader, similar to the successful experiment that was carried out in Assam in May 2021.