New Delhi: BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya has had a busy few days in his home state Madhya Pradesh. From belting out bhajans in Harda district and congratulating cricket players after the India-Australia blind T20 world cup match in Indore, to accompanying the chief minister to the birthday celebrations of a veteran leader in Damoh, he has been active.
But Vijayvargiya’s current schedule is a far cry from the days when he was one of the most powerful leaders in the BJP’s organisational set-up considered close to Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
Ever since the BJP’s drubbing last year in West Bengal, where Vijayvargiya had been the party in-charge, he has been seemingly divested of any significant duties.
While 66-year-old Vijayvargiya did participate in the BJP office-bearers’ meet held in Delhi last week, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also present, he is no longer front and centre in the party’s political activities.
Of all the nine general secretaries at the meet, he was the only one who has not been appointed as the in-charge of one state or another.
When asked about this, Vijayvargiya told ThePrint that he had a full plate. “I am very active in MP. I campaigned in the recent local body elections and am now galvanising cadres for the state polls next year and the Lok Sabha elections in 2024,” he said.
“I am a worker of the BJP. Whatever the party assigns to me, I try to deliver. It is up to them to decide my role and utility,” he added.
While Vijayvargiya has been credited with helping the BJP make inroads in Bengal, the Trinamool Congress’ (TMC’s) victory in the 2021 assembly elections broke a dam of accusations against him. These ranged from his campaign strategy and candidate selection to driving away leaders into the arms of the Trinamool by sidelining them.
State BJP leader Tathagata Roy, former governor of Tripura and Meghalaya, went as far as to call Vijayvargiya the leader of a “pack” that “brought irrevocable loss to the state”.
While the BJP’s central leadership continued to defend Vijayvargiya internally, party sources have said they asked him to keep his distance from West Bengal. Earlier this year, the BJP replaced him with two new co-in-charges for the state — Sunil Bansal, who has received substantial credit for helping the party sweep Uttar Pradesh, in August, and then Mangal Pandey in October.
However, BJP sources that ThePrint spoke to said that it would be a mistake to assume that Vijayvargiya had been put out to pasture for good. They pointed out that there was a reason he was still a national general secretary.
“Vijayvargiya may not have as much work now, but he is still a general secretary because the party knows that he can be useful in any emergency. The Lok Sabha elections are coming up and he can be put to use in any state,” a senior central BJP leader said.
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‘He is waiting for his time…’
At first glance, it seems as if the BJP high command’s faith in Vijayvargiya has finally been shaken. After the Bengal election results came out in May 2021, the party kept him on as state in-charge until as late as August this year, but he did not visit the state in all this time.
When he was finally removed as Bengal in-charge, the party did not delegate duties in any other state to him either, despite his reputed organisational skills.
“Amit Shah likes Vijayvargiya, but after the Bengal unit complained about him mismanaging funds and cadres, his position has weakened in the prime minister’s eyes and it’s why he was not deputed to any state,” said a second central BJP leader.
“The party could have used an experienced in-charge in states like Bihar, Rajasthan and Karnataka, but he has been kept waiting. It shows a lack of trust,” he added.
However, other BJP sources say that Vijayvargiya’s organisational skills have not been languishing and that he is playing a major role in Madhya Pradesh politics.
MP BJP vice-president Jitu Jirati told ThePrint that Vijayvargiya often travels around the state to mobilise party cadres ahead of the approaching assembly elections. “He is very much active in state party activities,” Jirati said.
Further, as the first central BJP leader quoted said, he is still national general secretary and could be pressed into service at any time.
The same leader said that it cannot be forgotten that Vijayvargiya played a key role in toppling MP’s short-lived Congress government in 2020. Back then, senior Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia and 22 party MLAs resigned from the party just 15 months after the party came to power and joined the BJP.
As the political crisis unfolded in March that year, it was Vijayvargiya who was one of the main men “behind the operation” of squirreling away the Congress rebels in a Gurgaon hotel, the BJP leader said. The BJP ousted the Kamal Nath government and came to power under the chief ministership of Shivraj Singh Chouhan that same month.
Vijayvargiya himself has CM ambitions, an MP BJP leader said.
“He is waiting for his time. If Shivraj Singh Chouhan is replaced, a window could open up for him to be a contender for the CM post. This is the reason why Jyotiraditya Scindia, who was once an opponent of Vijayvargiya, has warmed up now,” he claimed.
“Vijayvargiya is a better CM choice to project ahead of polls rather than [state home minister] Narottam Mishra,” he added. “No other leader has as much muscle power and hold in the state financial capital Indore as Vijayvargiya.”
Rise, and stumble from grace
A staunch RSS man, a former mayor of Indore, and a six-time MLA, Vijayvargiya has often courted controversy with his utterances, ranging from comparing Shah Rukh Khan to Dawood Ibrahim to claiming that construction workers at his house seemed to be Bangladeshis because they were eating flattened rice.
However, he is also known for his efficient style of operating. In 2014, when Vijayvargiya was a minister in the MP cabinet, Amit Shah called him to Delhi, and soon thereafter appointed him as in-charge of Haryana for the assembly polls that year. The BJP won and formed a government for the first time in the state.
One of Vijayvargiya’s accomplishments at that time was to convince the Dera Sacha Sauda, a controversial but influential religious sect, to support the BJP, which helped the party win some seats.
Impressed with Vijayvargiya’s performance, Shah tasked him next with project West Bengal and appointed him as the state in-charge in 2015. It seemed to be a good choice. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the party won 18 out of 42 seats in the state, with its vote-share going up from 10 per cent to 40 per cent.
The 2021 state elections, however, proved to be a disappointing exercise even though the party won 77 out of the 294 seats, which was still far better than its earlier tally of three in 2016.
However, the rumblings in the state BJP unit against Vijayvargiya were hard for the party’s high command to ignore. One of the factors causing discontent was the importance accorded to Trinamool turncoats and then the subsequent return of several of them to the victorious party. Among the prominent faces who switched to the Trinamool were MLA Mukul Roy (who had also been in the party earlier) and former Union minister Babul Supriyo.
From Tathagata Roy and Dilip Ghosh to Arvind Menon and Shiv Menon, several BJP leaders blamed Vijayvargiya for the state unit being in disarray. The BJP then put in motion an organisational overhaul in the state, including replacing Dilip Ghosh with Sukanta Majumdar as state president in September last year.
Vijayvargiya, however, was phased out more slowly. He more or less disappeared from the state after counting day, but was kept on as state in-charge until this August, after which he is yet to be fully rehabilitated by the high command.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
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