In March 2019, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked set for another term in office, I, like a party pooper, flagged in a #PoliticallyCorrect column what I thought was crucial to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s future in the long term: “Unlike Vajpayee & Advani, gen next BJP leaders groomed by Modi-Shah don’t look promising.”
I pointed out how Advani-Vajpayee had groomed the Gen Next — Narendra Modi, Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh, Pramod Mahajan, Vasundhara Raje, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and many more. And then I named a few who Modi as the PM and Shah as the party president promoted between 2014 and 2019. Most of them failed to impress.
That was in 2019. You can probably blame me for being hasty with my assessment of the success or failure of Modi-Shah’s HR policy. Five-and-a-half years since I wrote that piece, much has changed.
A decade is a good enough time to study the progress of those promoted by Modi-Shah. The sample size is also bigger now. Besides, for all the contestations by the BJP’s spin masters, PM Modi is probably serving his last term. Looking at his legacy in terms of how he groomed the next generation of leadership is perfectly legitimate today.
Also read: Why PM Modi & Amit Shah should, in national interest, defer plans for a BJP CM in Srinagar
Modi-Shah’s HR policy and questions
Let’s look at the first set of chief ministers that Modi-Shah appointed in 2014 and how they have fared: Manohar Lal Khattar in Haryana, Devendra Fadnavis in Maharashtra, and Raghubar Das in Jharkhand.
In the just-concluded Haryana election, the BJP was virtually ‘hiding’ its CM of nine and a half years. Khattar hardly figured on the party’s posters or in other publicity materials. He remained confined to his Lok Sabha constituency, Karnal. At PM Modi’s rally in Hisar, say BJP insiders, Khattar was asked to address the meeting, but he refused. Few BJP candidates wanted the two-term CM to campaign for them. The BJP had removed Khattar in March because he was seen as a poll liability, but he chose his own successor, Nayab Singh Saini. Khattar was rehabilitated as a Cabinet minister at the Centre and had a big say in the distribution of party tickets. All these thanks to his friendship with Modi in their good old days as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharaks. Few would contest the failure of the Khattar experiment in Haryana, no matter what happens on the results day on Tuesday.
Modi-Shah bet on Raghubar Das in Jharkhand in what turned out to be another failed experiment. The CM couldn’t even save his own assembly seat in the next election. Like Khattar, Das was also rehabilitated—in the Odisha Raj Bhawan. The governor landed in a soup recently after his son allegedly assaulted a Raj Bhawan staffer for not arranging luxury vehicles for him.
With the BJP high command backing him and the party running the government in the state, Das has come out unscathed. The case is as good as dead.
In the case of Fadnavis, he proved himself an able administrator. He could have got a second term in office but for Uddhav Thackeray putting a spanner in the works and Amit Shah choosing not to engage with him. Like BS Yediyurappa in Karnataka and Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Fadnavis proved his political acumen, engineering the fall of the Uddhav Thackeray-led government. But, while BSY and Chouhan got rewarded with CMship, Fadnavis was left high and dry as Modi-Shah gifted the CM’s chair to Eknath Shinde. The central BJP leadership has promoted Shinde to the hilt since then, much to the marginalisation of Fadnavis in Maharashtra politics.
Fadnavis looks like a big loser even before the next elections. For whatever reasons, Brand Fadnavis has lost much of its sheen. Many in the BJP privately attribute it to growing talks in political circles and the media about Fadnavis being a potential prime ministerial candidate.
So, that’s the fate of the first three faces that Modi-Shah promoted in states in 2014.
Let’s look at the others.
In 2016, it was Sarbananda Sonowal as Assam CM. But he was an ‘outsider’ — as was his successor Himanta Biswa Sarma who the BJP has had to rely on for power in the state. Modi-Shah promoted Trivendra Singh Rawat as the Uttarakhand CM in 2017, only to replace him with Tirath Sigh Rawat four years later. Tirath was replaced within four months by Pushkar Singh Dhami. In the assembly election about six months later, Dhami couldn’t win his own seat but Modi-Shah retained him as the CM. Former CM of Himachal Pradesh, Prem Kumar Dhumal, who was never a great friend of Modi, wasn’t as fortunate as Dhami. After Dhumal lost the election, Modi-Shah chose Jairam Thakur over him, only to lose power in the hill state five years later. Incidentally, Dhumal’s son, Anurag Thakur, a bright, young leader who worked hard to endear himself to Modi-Shah, has been left out in the cold now.
In Gujarat, Modi-Shah decided to replace Anandiben Patel with Vijay Rupani in 2016. They, however, replaced him with Bhupendra Patel about 14 months before the 2022 election. It’s not about Patel’s or Rupani’s abilities. The CM is just a ceremonial head in Gujarat today. Modi and Shah run the Gujarat government through trusted bureaucrats—first through K Kailashnathan and now Hasmukh Adhia.
Among the other faces Modi-Shah promoted, there were Biplab Deb in Tripura and N Biren Singh in Manipur. Deb, who was credited for bringing the BJP to power in the Communist-ruled state for the first time, was removed as the CM about eight months before the 2023 assembly election. The reason for his replacement is still in the realm of speculation. Biren Singh of Manipur, however, continues to enjoy Modi-Shah’s trust, no matter how he led the state into chaos.
Last man standing
The list of leaders promoted by Modi-Shah in the last 10 years is long. Only two of them really shone—Fadnavis and Yogi Adityanath. We have discussed the fall of Fadnavis. From among the CMs picked up by Modi-Shah since 2014, Yogi is the last performing man standing today.
There has been much speculation about how Adityanath became the CM. Nobody saw him emerging as Modi’s potential successor. As it is, Yogi is under siege from within, with speculation swirling about how the setback to the BJP in the last Lok Sabha election was part of a larger plan to ‘sabotage’ his ‘ambitions’.
Yogi seems to have survived it. He has now set for himself a big goal of making UP ‘poverty free’ in the next one year. He is charting his own path, trying to draw a bigger line than his rivals’.
There is also a long list of leaders who Modi-Shah promoted by bringing them into the government. Most of them lived in their shadows, basking in their reflected glory. Others just fell by the wayside. Have you thought of why, for instance, Smriti Irani, who emerged as a leader in her own right in today’s male-dominated leadership of the BJP, was pushed to the sidelines? So much so that the BJP high command chose to bring the most recent Congress defector like Kiran Choudhary to the Rajya Sabha but found no place for Smriti Irani. She is in the political wilderness today. Dharmendra Pradhan, who worked hard in Odisha for years to bring the party to power, was left disappointed as Modi-Shah opted for Mohan Majhi as the CM.
Rajasthan CM Bhajan Lal Sharma, a first-term MLA who trumped veteran Vasundhara Raje to secure the coveted chair, is the new addition to the list of Modi-Shah’s failed experiments in states. Sharma looks clueless as the Rajasthan government hits headlines for all the wrong reasons — from an unnamed minister firing up the social media over his alleged involvement with a Russian girl in a Delhi hotel to a Cabinet minister refusing to withdraw his resignation for months, paper leaks, bureaucracy’s control over the political executive and what not.
Why Modi-Shah’s HR policy is floundering
The above-mentioned instances of Modi-Shah’s experiments in states— while leaving out the Central list for now—show how the golden era of the BJP under Modi’s leadership is also marked by the absence of mass leaders is states. Why is it that Vajpayee-Advani could nurture future leadership but Modi-Shah couldn’t? Is it because Vajpayee-Advani didn’t see themselves as bigger than the party and worked to strengthen it for a long term? Is it because they put a premium on leadership potential and skills, not individual leaders’ ‘loyalty’ and ability to bend backward and forward? Is it because Vajpayee-Advani didn’t have insecurities about new leadership possibly throwing up a challenge? Or, is it just the failure to spot and judge talent and competence?
There are questions galore when it comes to the BJP’s failure to develop alternative leadership in states, who could hold the fort in the absence of a mass leader like Vajpayee or Modi. There are no simple, straight answers. The BJP had leaders like Modi, Chouhan, Raje, Raman Singh, BSY, and Dhumal, among many others, who kept the party’s flame burning when Vajpayee-Advani were fading away. Now that the BJP needs to prepare for the post-Modi era, the absence of such leaders to fill the impending void must be scary for those who care about the party.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)