There is a new Congress in town and it’s the Bharatiya Janata Party. This was the title of a column I had written in ThePrint in October last year. I had spotted five trends, or indicators, in the BJP to arrive at that conclusion: the high command-ist culture, a premium on loyalty and sycophancy, promotion of leaders with no mass base, nepotism, and pervasive cliques around power centres.
Since then, a new trend has emerged in the BJP, something that started in the Congress under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and was perpetuated by her successors: a systematic undermining and demolition of mass leaders in states. This was the genesis of the Congress party’s eventual fall.
The BJP is repeating that mistake by virtually sidelining most of its prominent state leaders: Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa, former chief ministers Vasundhara Raje (Rajasthan), Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh) and Raman Singh (Chhattisgarh). One could add many more names to this list – former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, whose constituency was inexplicably changed at the last minute resulting in his defeat in the last election; former Madhya Pradesh CM Uma Bharati; former Uttarakhand CMs B.C. Khanduri and Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank (now accommodated in the Union cabinet); and Sushil Modi in Bihar, to name a few.
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After he dislodged JDS-Congress government in Karnataka, Yediyurappa had to be installed as the chief minister. But the BJP high command has saddled him with three deputies, virtually defanging him. He had no say in the choice of his successor as Karnataka BJP chief either. Last week, a group of Lingayat seers spoke on his behalf, cautioning the BJP against deposing him.
Raje, Chouhan and Singh, all former chief ministers of the states that the BJP lost last year, have no one to speak for them in the party. The three are proven mass leaders in their respective states — the only ones after Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the national level. In 2003, Raje had won a clear majority for the BJP in Rajasthan, winning 120 of 200 assembly seats — a feat even party stalwart Bhairon Singh Shekhawat could never achieve. She lost the next election but returned with a bigger mandate in 2013. Similarly, Chouhan and Singh got the BJP a renewed mandate in 2008 on their own — coming out of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s shadow.
But when these three leaders won their states for the party in December 2013 again, many in the BJP attributed it to the ‘Modi wave’, the party’s prime ministerial candidate then. Cut to December 2018. The same people were castigating them for the party’s defeat in the assembly elections. The high command was quick to appoint them as national vice-presidents of the BJP, a ceremonial post. It was meant to be a signal of the end of their role in state politics, and not a mark of acknowledgement to their contributions. Raje and Raman Singh don’t have a room of their own at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. They sit in whichever room is unoccupied. Chouhan was made in-charge of the party membership drive, in which the BJP claimed to have enrolled seven crore more people. Did anyone hear Chouhan getting credit for it?
Yediyurappa, Raje, Chouhan and Raman Singh remain the only mass leaders of the BJP in states. The party high command has propped up many leaders to replace them but those are lightweights even in their own constituencies. In Rajasthan, the high command has picked up all Raje detractors for rewards—Om Birla as Lok Sabha Speaker, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat as a cabinet minister, and Jagdeep Dhankhar as West Bengal governor. B.L. Santosh, who has had constant run-ins with Yediyurappa in Karnataka, has been appointed the national general secretary (organisation) of the BJP.
Kailash Vijayvargiya, Chouhan’s detractor, is in Amit Shah’s inner circles. His clout is such that the party refused to take action against his legislator son, Akash Vijayvargiya, even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted action against him for publicly beating up a municipal officer in Indore.
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Fear of a ‘Syndicate’ that never was?
For a party that owes its rise to the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the undermining of mass leaders in states defies logic.
Indira Gandhi, in her initial years, had to grapple with the ‘Syndicate’ in the Congress, comprising powerful regional chieftains such as K. Kamaraj of Tamil Nadu (then Madras state), S. Nijalingappa of Karnataka (then Mysore state), S.K. Patil of Maharashtra, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy of Andhra Pradesh, and Atulya Ghosh of West Bengal among others. They would choose Jawaharlal Nehru’s successor and then Lal Bahadur Shastri’s, before Indira Gandhi took them on.
Having fought a bitter and protracted turf war with regional satraps to establish her supremacy in the party, Indira Gandhi turned averse to promoting anyone in the states who was a leader in his or her own right. All Congress chief ministers had to owe their chairs to only her and not to the people. Being a mass leader was soon to become a big minus point in the Congress.
The BJP never had a Syndicate as such. When Modi came on to the national stage, there was some resistance from L.K. Advani to his projection as the prime ministerial candidate. But the naysayers had to fall in line. Other ambitious leaders chose to maintain silence and also a safe distance from the ‘Margdarshak’ Mandal essentially comprising leaders who had lost their direction in politics. Some of the political beneficiaries of Vajpayee-Advani era survived the transition—Rajnath Singh, M. Venkaiah Naidu, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari, and Ravi Shankar Prasad among others.
But it’s the mass leaders who seem to be out of favour in the BJP, inexplicably. Vasundhara Raje’s refusal to submit to powers that be might be partly responsible for her isolation in Delhi, but it was not the case with Chouhan or Singh. Nor was it the case with B.C. Khanduri or Pokhriyal Nishank or others who find themselves on the margins in Modi-Shah-led BJP.
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Is it the endgame for BJP’s regional satraps?
At 76, Yediyurappa may be looking at an endgame, but Chouhan (60), Raje (66), and Raman Singh (66) have a lot of fight left in them. So do other leaders of stature in different states.
They may not be of much use to the BJP high command today, with Modi’s popularity continuing to soar. With the Congress and most other opposition parties on life support, Modi of 2019 looks stronger and better placed than even Indira Gandhi of 1971 who had bifurcated Pakistan. And he is still only 69 years old. The BJP may not need mass leaders in states at least until the next Lok Sabha election.
There may be some BJP leaders who acquire the image of being strong and decisive as Modi has been or as Vallabhbhai Patel was. They may have strong oratorical skills, too. But he or she wouldn’t have the same hypnotic influence on the masses. A Narendra Modi is born after generations.
Whenever Modi decides to hang his boots, the BJP will need strong regional leaders to keep the saffron flag flying high. The ones being propped up and promoted in states today hardly inspire any confidence. And that should keep Raje and her ilk hopeful.