The Raipur-Guwahati connection

May 2 will decide the fate of five governments (four states and a Union Territory), and the political future of Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel.

In the state, Mr Baghel needs no help. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is comatose after the 2018 elections, when it could win only 15 of the 90 seats in the Assembly. Former chief minister Raman Singh has been drafted into party work as national vice-president. D Purandeswari, Andhra Pradesh leader and Congress import into the BJP, and Nitin Nabin, four-time MLA from Bankipore in Bihar, were designated as the centre’s eyes and ears and find out what was ailing the party. But it is still a work in progress.

Internally, Mr Baghel faces almost no challengers from the Congress. The Chhatti­s­garh unit of the party today is — almost shockingly — united: As much as a party can be. To be sure, there is the Health and Panchayat Raj Minister T S Singhdeo, who believes he should have been chief minister and keeps reminding Mr Baghel that the promises in the Congress manifesto cannot be left unfulfilled. And although both leaders deny this, there is some half-and-half scheme. Unlike Madhya Pradesh, where infighting in the Congress cost the party the government; or Rajasthan, where MLAs had to be whisked off by Ashok Gehlot so that his party leader and number 2, Sachin Pilot, couldn’t poach them, Chhattisgarh seems to have no such problems: Yet.

Mr Baghel is taking advantage of the tranquillity, such as it is, to raise his profile. He is, in recent memory, possibly the only serving chief minister from the Congress to have been put in charge of elections in another state: The ongoing election in Assam. He’s putting everything he has into the poll: Whether it was soothing ruffled feathers when irate Congress leaders like Sushmita Dev threatened to resign because a larger number of seats were given to Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front and the Congress didn’t get a fair deal; or pouring funds into the campaign. In fact, earlier this month, while Union Home Minister Amit Shah cut short his tour of Assam when there was an attack by left-wing extremists (LWE) and returned to New Delhi to coordinate security force operations, Mr Baghel reached Chhattisgarh only in the evening, when campaigning in Assam was over. And this, after there was intelligence for over 10 days that Madvi Hidma [a top leader of the banned CPI (Maoist) linked to major attacks including the 2013 Jhiram Ghati incident, which killed nearly 30 people including some eminent Congress leaders] was in the area.

In terms of governance, while the pandemic has left the state crippled, Mr Baghel has made the rural economy the centrepiece of his government’s economic policy. The scheme of purchasing cowdung from farmers led to many theories about the government’s soft Hindutva tendencies. Gaudhan Nyay Yojana, or GNY, was launched in July last year. Since then, the government has disbursed Rs 64 crore to 140,000 cow owners for the dung collected from them. This is then transported to more than 3,500 government-run cowsheds, where it is turned into fertiliser and other products. But the rural economy focus is much more than that. If Raman Singh’s triumph was public distribution service reform, Mr Baghel promises to procure grain: Chhattisgarh has set a record of procuring more than 9.2 million tonnes of paddy under the minimum support price (MSP) scheme during the Kharif marketing year 2020-21. No Chhattisgarh farmer is protesting or demanding guaranteed MSP, secure in the knowledge that the state government will buy all his produce.

For Mr Baghel, winning the Assam election is a big challenge. The man who counselled Rahul Gandhi to hold his own against the Jogi family despite advice that Ajit Jogi’s party would cut into the Congress vote, has been proved right. Mr Baghel began political life as an acolyte of Congress veteran Chandulal Chandrakar. He began with little of his own independent base. And even now, if he is seeing a bigger role for himself, it is because of the party high command in New Delhi.

His relationship with Raman Singh is so bitter that it verges on the personal. The reason is the cases registered by the BJP government against him, his wife, and his mother in a 20-year-old case of allotting plots in Bhilai in Durg district, Baghel’s home town. In 2017, when the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the state government registered the case, Baghel and his family walked into the EOW office and sat on a dharna, demanding to be arrested immediately. The two leaders have avoided sharing a platform together.

If the Congress wins the Assam elections, a national future for Bhupesh Baghel is assured. But if it loses, TS Singhdeo is sure to become more vocal. Ensuring a Congress government in Guwahati is crucial for stability in Raipur.