Day of the Wave Riders

AS ANTICIPATED, THE DARK HORSES MADE IT to the chief ministers’ chairs in the three states—Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh—where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged victori­ous, defeating Congress, in the recent Assembly elections. As secrecy sur­rounded the names, characteristic of the Narendra Modi government, there was speculation over several names of old hats and new probables. But the only certainty was that the choices would be unforeseen. They were signalling that the era of the warhorses—Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje, and Raman Singh—had ended. The party maintained a stoic silence till the moment the announcement was made, in each case, taking even the person chosen to be chief minister by surprise. The new faces—Vishnu Deo Sai (Chhattisgarh), Mohan Yadav (Madhya Pradesh), and Bhajan Lal Sharma (Rajasthan)—are all in their fifties, less known, and organisational men close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They tick all the boxes, as the BJP leader­ship focuses on the 2024 General Election, hoping to cash in on a blend of caste and ideology, sending a message that it was rejecting elitism and reaching out to the marginalised. It was spelt out in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory speech at the party headquarters in New Delhi after the results, when he under­scored the importance of empowering the tribal and Other Backward Class (OBC) communities, both segments of what to him were the “only four castes”—women, the poor, youth, and farmers. If it is a Yadav in Madhya Pradesh, nominating a new OBC face, in Rajasthan, BJP chose a Brahmin who is a first-time MLA, and in Chhattisgarh, where it won 17 of the 29 Scheduled Tribe (ST) seats in the 90-member Assembly, the party decided on a tribal leader. With this, BJP has expanded its caste umbrella in the Hindi heartland where it had neither a Brahmin nor a tribal chief minister. Both Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and his Uttarakhand counterpart Pushkar Singh Dhami are Thakurs.

MOHAN YADAV [Madhya Pradesh]

As the media speculated on names of several veterans till minutes before the announcement, Mohan Yadav was himself caught unawares. Over the past two decades, Madhya Pradesh, with a nearly 50 per cent OBC population, has been run by BJP’s OBC chief ministers, with Shivraj Singh Chouhan himself getting four terms. This time, too, the party has chosen an OBC, but for the first time a Yadav. This is seen as a strategy to not only reach out to the community in Madhya Pradesh, where its population is concentrated in the Bundelkhand belt, but also in neighbouring UP, where the politi­cally influential section is the turf of Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP), as well as in Bihar, where the commu­nity constituting the single-largest caste at around 14 per cent has been loyal to Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). Mohan Yadav’s wife, Seema, is from Sultanpur in UP, where the Yadav population is estimated at 9 per cent. BJP has set its eyes on 2024, hoping it would breach the bastions of the two Yadav leaders to further consolidate its OBC outreach.

After Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar released the state’s caste survey, pegging the OBC population at 63.1 per cent, Congress promised it would conduct caste surveys in states ruled by it, projecting it as a social justice plank to counter BJP’s Hindutva narrative. Congress, however, lost the elections in all three states. In Madhya Pradesh, the only state among these where Congress was not in power, BJP won 163 of the 230 Assembly seats.

At 58, Yadav marked a change of guard, ending Chouhan’s four-term reign. In BJP’s calculations, Yadav passed muster on various fronts. His political career began in the early 1980s with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), RSS’ student wing, with which his association grew over the years. Ujjain-born Yadav, a three-time MLA from the Ujjain South seat and a wrestler, has been president of the Madhya Pradesh Amateur Wrestling Association for the last 12 years. As education minister in the Chouhan government, Yadav, whose educational qualifications read BSc, LLB, MA, MBA, PhD, introduced Tulsidas’ Ramcharit­manas as an optional chapter for under­graduates of philosophy and laid the foundation stone for the “world’s first Vedic clock” at Jiwaji observatory in Ujjain. He is BJP’s fourth OBC leader to become chief minister in a state where politics was dominated by the upper castes till the late 1970s. Formulating a caste balance, BJP has also made Jagdish Devda, a Dalit, and Rajendra Shukla, a Brahmin, deputies to Yadav, and Nar­endra Singh Tomar, a Thakur, who was a minister in the Modi government, speaker of the state Assembly.

VISHNU DEO SAI [Chhattisgarh]

It took exactly a week to end the suspense in Chhattisgarh, with Vishnu Deo Sai being the first to be named among the three chief ministers. A tribal from Surguja region, which BJP swept winning all 14 seats, he met sev­eral prerequisites, yet he was not seen to be the frontrunner. Sai, the first tribal to be chief minister of the 23-year-old state, will be the new icon in the party’s tribal outreach ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. If President Droupadi Murmu represents the Santhal tribe, mostly in Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, and As­sam in eastern India, Sai belongs to the Kanwar tribe, found in states of central India, including Maharashtra and Mad­hya Pradesh, besides Chhattisgarh.

With tribal support playing a crucial role in BJP’s victory in 54 of the 90 As­sembly seats in Chhattisgarh where the community is estimated to comprise about 30 per cent of the population, it was apparent that the party could not ignore considering a tribal face at the helm. Soft-spoken, non-controversial and untainted, Sai is not known to have rubbed anyone the wrong way. Born in Jashpur, the headquarters of the RSS-backed Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, he was groomed by the late Dilip Singh Judeo, former Union minister and party leader, who was at the forefront of the “ghar wapsi”, or reconversion of tribals to Hinduism in the state.

At 59, Sai also has age on his side. A four-time MP and two-time MLA in undivided Madhya Pradesh, he is among the state’s seniormost leaders, yet the youngest among them, bringing about a generational shift at the helm. Sai began his political career in 1990, as did former Chief Minister Raman Singh who has crossed 70. Singh, a three-time chief minister, belongs to the upper caste. At 26, Sai won the Tapkara Assembly seat. He was again elected in 1993, but in 1998 he was shifted to Pathalgaon, and lost. From 1999 onwards he won the Lok Sabha election from Raigarh for four consecutive terms, and went on to become the only minister from Chhattisgarh in the Modi government in 2014. In 2019, however, following BJP’s humiliating defeat in the Chhat­tisgarh Assembly elections of 2018, the party leadership decided to change the MPs from the state. Sai announced that he would not contest the polls. He was made state party chief in 2020, but was replaced in 2022 with Arun Sao, an OBC, who had taken on the Congress aggres­sively. Sai again silently complied with the party’s decision. His patience paid off, much to his own surprise.

With the Modi government, which has increased budgetary allocations fivefold for tribal communities and announced a `24,000 crore project for vulnerable tribal groups, going all out to reach out to the community, the selection of a tribal face falls in line with its strategy. Sai’s political graph gave him an edge over other tribal leaders like Renuka Singh, a minister in the Modi government fielded from the Bharatpur- Sonhat seat of Surguja region, and Kedar Kashyap, former minister in the Raman Singh government, both of whom were speculated to be in the race for the chief minister’s post. BJP had also fielded Gomati Sai, its MP from Raigarh, Vishnu Sai’s former constituency, in the Assembly elections from Pathalgaon. Vishnu Sai, meanwhile, fought from Kunkuri, defeating Congress MLA UD Minj. In a balancing act, Sao has been named deputy chief minister along with Vijay Sharma, a Brahmin, and Raman Singh, a Rajput, will be speaker. Sai has always stayed away from the limelight, but now in the spotlight, he will be facing a new test.

BHAJAN LAL SHARMA [Rajasthan]

Just as the guessing game reached a crescendo with more names being added for potential chief ministers of Rajasthan, the post went to someone who did not even figure on the list. Of the three new chief ministers, Bhajan Lal Sharma’s is the shortest profile as far as electoral politics goes. Though a first-time MLA, having won by 48,000 votes from the BJP stronghold of Sanganer in Jaipur district, Sharma has been an organisa­tion man, working behind the scenes, and was general secretary of the party’s state unit thrice. Like Yadav, he too began his political journey with ABVP. As a student leader, he participated in the Kashmir March in 1990, protesting against attacks on Kashmiri Pandits.

After a tribal in Chhattisgarh and an OBC in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP leadership decided against going in for a chief minister from any of the dominant castes in Rajasthan, zero­ing in on a Brahmin, an upper caste which comprises just 7 per cent of the population. While the strategic move would avert any acerbity among the dominant castes in the state, it would send a message across the border to other states in the Hindi belt where the share of the Brahmin vote is higher. In a caste balancing act in the state, the party appointed royal-turned-politician Diya Kumari, seen as someone being groomed to replace Raje in a state where Rajputs play a crucial role in politics, and Prem Chand Bairwa, a Dalit, a section forming the second-largest block after OBCs, as deputy chief ministers. Kumari, a Lok Sabha MP, who was fielded from Jaipur’s Vidhya­dhar Nagar Assembly constituency, is the only woman among the new chief ministers and deputy chief ministers announced for the three states.

The choice of Sharma, 56, has also made a generational shift in Rajasthan’s politics where BJP’s Vasundhara Raje and Congress’ Ashok Gehlot, both septuagenarians, have alternated as chief ministers since 1998. Apart from Gehlot, who belongs to the Mali caste, only Congress’ Hari Dev Joshi, a Brah­min, has held the post of chief minister thrice in the state. Joshi is known to have never lost an election.

2023 In ReviewAssembly Elections 2023Bhajan Lal SharmaChhattisgarhMadhya PradeshMohan YadavpoliticsRajasthanVishnu Deo Sai