If Prime Minister Narendra Modi had not been the face of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral campaign, would you still have voted for the party? That was the question posed to BJP voters in the CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey.
Look at the percentage of BJP voters who answered in the negative—19 per cent in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and 24 per cent in Rajasthan. So, the Modi factor playing a decisive role in the last assembly elections stands validated.
Remove these voters from the BJP’s equation and the party would have lost in these states. That seems to justify the BJP central leadership’s decision to not declare any chief ministerial face in these elections and go for ‘collective leadership’ instead.
What the numbers reveal
Let’s look at another question in the post-poll survey: “After the assembly election results are out, who would you like to see as the next chief minister of Madhya Pradesh?” Among BJP voters, 77 per cent opted for Shivraj Singh Chouhan, 6 per cent for Jyotiraditya Scindia and 4 per cent for Narendra Singh Tomar. To the same question in Rajasthan, 32 per cent of BJP voters favoured former chief minister Vasundhara Raje and 17 per cent Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. In Chhattisgarh, 59 per cent voted for former CM Raman Singh.
What do BJP voters’ answers to these two questions tell us? The first is a no-brainer—that without Modi as the BJP’s face, the party would have lost the elections. Second, Chouhan and Singh remained the top choice for most BJP voters in MP and Chhattisgarh, although the same can’t be said about Raje in Rajasthan. A third of BJP voters wanted Raje to become the chief minister—as against 17 per cent for Shekhawat, considered her rival for the post— but it seemed to be more a case of absence of options.
If answers to the first question justified BJP’s decision to make Modi the face in all these states, are answers to the second question enough for promoting new candidates there? On Sunday, the BJP chose Vishnu Deo Sai, a tribal leader, as the next chief minister of Chhattisgarh. For all we know, the party may opt for fresh faces in Rajasthan and MP, too.
If it happens, can anyone fault the BJP high command’s decision to sideline veterans? No, not in the case of Raman Singh and Raje, at least. Singh might be the choice of 59 per cent of BJP voters but only 33 per cent of “overall” voters wanted him as CM in the CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey. He may be disappointed but not upset. Sai is close to him.
In Rajasthan, Raje was favoured by only 14 per cent of “overall” voters. What makes them relatively more popular among BJP voters is the fact that they have been the party’s face in these states for over two decades. The BJP high command might be justified in giving more weight to the opinion of overall voters and promoting new faces who could broaden the party’s appeal beyond BJP cadres and sympathisers.
In Chhattisgarh, for instance, nobody can find fault with the party’s CM choice. It’s a state with a 31 per cent tribal population, which proved to be decisive in choosing the winner of this election.
The tribal-dominated districts of Bastar and Sarguja saw a reversal of fortune this time, with the BJP winning 22 out of 26 seats; it had only won one in 2018.
Also read: Why projecting PM Modi as BJP’s face in assembly polls is a risky gambit
Promoting new leadership
Shivraj Chouhan’s case may be a bit different, though. If 77 BJP voters and 39 per cent of overall voters wanted him as the next CM in the post-poll survey, it was because of his good governance. Sixty-five per cent said in the survey that his popularity has increased or remained the same. It’s a huge endorsement for a leader who has been CM for over 18 years. And he is just 64.
We can use data from the CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey to see the merits of the BJP high command’s push for changing the leadership of Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. The central leadership’s treatment of Chouhan, however, will give an indication of whether the central leadership’s sole objective behind replacing veteran leaders is to phase out unpopular, decadent leadership or there is another agenda behind it. MP assembly election results have given a thumbs-up to his governance model and the fatigue factor turned out to be more notional than factual.
A fifth term as CM for a 64-year-old OBC leader would put him at the forefront of the race to succeed an OBC PM—be it in 2029 or 2034. If Chouhan is also replaced, given the near-certainty about Raje’s sidelining, it will mark the formal denouement of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani’s era in the BJP with nobody from that period being in the saddle in any state.
Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have been consistent and persistent when it comes to promoting new leadership in states. In that sense, they have only carried forward what Vajpayee-Advani started.
The only difference is that most of Modi-Shah’s nominees failed to justify their promotion by creating a mass base of their own – starting from Manohar Lal Khattar in Haryana, Raghubar Das in Jharkhand, Basavaraj Bommai in Karnataka, Vijay Rupani in Gujarat, and Jairam Thakur in Himachal Pradesh, among others. In the first batch of these new leaders, Devendra Fadnavis emerged as a real find and was once seen as a potential PM candidate.
He seems to have fallen out of favour with the central leadership now, for reasons best known to the latter. Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma can’t be put in this category as he, like Arunachal Pradesh CM Pema Khandu, is ‘self-made’. In that sense, Yogi Adityanath of Uttar Pradesh has been Modi-Shah’s biggest success story so far whether they publicly acknowledge it or not.
As for Rajasthan, MP, and Chhattisgarh, the BJP high command can afford to carry out experiments with state leadership without worrying about any adverse fallout in the next Lok Sabha election. Because PM Modi is known to sweep these states on his own in general elections.
DK Singh is ThePrint’s Political Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)