How cow politics and a majoritarian agenda have bound 5 BJP CMs

Midway through their tenure, how does the BJP see their chances of re-election

The cow and deference towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi in varying measures are the two elements that bind the chief ministers (CMs) of Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. 

Manohar Lal Khattar, Vasundhara Raje, Shivraj Chouhan, Raman Singh and Devendra Fadnavis were elected (actually anointed) CMs of their respective states in different circumstances. Vasundhara is serving her second term at Rajasthan’s helm while Chouhan and Singh have had three uninterrupted tenures (although Chouhan was first brought in as MP chief minister mid-way through Uma Bharati’s inning). Khattar and Fadnavis are the greenhorns in governance and their mettle will be tested when Haryana and Maharashtra go to the polls in September 2019. Vasundhara, Chouhan and Singh await their tests earlier in December 2018. 

Khattar, a former ‘pracharak’ (whole-timer) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) like Modi, had the blessings of the paterfamilias and the Prime Minister although his choice took the BJP by surprise because Haryana’s politics was held up by entrenched caste pillars, to which he did not belong. Khattar is neither a Jat nor a Bishnoi, the castes that determined the state’s politics, nor from a backward caste. He is a Punjabi. But, Khattar and Fadnavis represent the elements in a paradigm that Modi and the BJP President Amit Shah have created ostensibly to contest caste-based socio-political stereotypes. Fadnavis is a Brahmin, a community that hardly counts in Maharashtra’s politics, over which the Marathas, Dalits and the backward castes hold sway.

Being the chosen ones of the BJP’s“high command”, Khattar and Fadnavis, who have battled formidable social challenges, staved off internal pressures from factional heads. Not so with Vasundhara and Chouhan, who are not regarded as favourites of Modi and Shah. Vasundhara allegedly dared Modi immediately after he won the Lok Sabha election while Chouhan was propped up as a rival by a group opposed to Modi. The low-key Chhattisgarh chief minister stayed afloat because he never revealed his national ambition.

Therefore, the RSS is a useful sheath armour for Chouhan and Vasundhara to counter the “high command” at the first sign of a threat to their positions. Vasundhara’s first stint as chief minister (2003-08) was marked by calculated indifference and even opposition to the RSS, for which she paid a price by losing its cooperation in the 2008 election, which she lost. It looked as though she would not moderate her stance towards the RSS this time too because one of Vasundhara’s first moves was to demolish 86 temples in Jaipur and facilitate the construction of the metro rail. The RSS was aflutter and labelled her “Aurangzeb”. She offered to reconstruct some of the temples but stood her ground even a year later when the 250-year-old Gauri Shankar Mahadev temple in Jaipur’s walled area was blocking the extension of a metro line. This time, Vasundhara consulted and confabulated with the RSS and sought its sanction before relocating the temple. Vasundhara hit a rough patch with the RSS when, a month after brokering peace, the RSS was up in arms over the death of 38 cows at a state-run bovine care home in Jaipur. She ordered a probe.

Vasundhara may be walking a tight-rope because she needs the RSS’s support to stay on amid rumours that she might be inducted in Modi’s cabinet in the next shuffle. It was evident because she has remained silent over the killing of a Muslim dairy farmer by the so-called cow protectors. In the name of “cow protection”, her government levied a 10 per cent surcharge on the stamp duty imposed for making rent and lease agreements and mortgage papers.

In presiding over her second dispensation, Vasundhara gleaned leaves from Modi’s Gujarat copybook. Like him and unlike her predecessor, Ashok Gehlot, populism did not tempt her. In interviews, she described freebies and entitlements with “running on the spot and not going anywhere” and emphasised that several people were ready to make a transition from “entitlement to empowerment”. She advocated the public-private partnership model as a means for successful governance, spoke of raising water tariffs for those who could afford to pay, and went ahead with legislating a slew of labour reforms that allow industries employing up to 300 workers to sack them without the government’s sanction and thwarts the scope of unionisation. Vasundhara argued that the “ministry of labour” nomenclature was outmoded and preferred calling the sector the “employment and skill development” ministry. 

If Vasundhara hosted her annual “Resurgent Rajasthan” jamborees, Chouhan is as punctilious about holding MP’s yearly “Global Investment” summits at the economic hub, Indore. Vasundhara and Chouhan are united in their mission to pull their respective states out of the “BIMARU” club. MP has everything industry can ask for. Acres of land, surplus power, water in plenty and good connectivity. Chouhan iterated that agriculture and industry were equal priorities for him. 

According to an occasional paper titled “Rising Agricultural Productivity and Making Farming Remunerative for Farmers” (Niti Aayog, December 16, 2015), in 2013-14, the farming area in MP was 14.94 (in million hectares) as compared with UP’s 16.05 and Punjab’s 6.56. MP’s farming area is 11.85 per cent of the entire country’s agricultural area. 

Where does MP stand on investments? The Congress alleged that the summit has become a “shopping mall” to draw footfalls in hundreds without resulting in “real” buyers. According to an Assocham study, investment in MP declined by 14 per cent in 2015 while 85 per cent of the Rs 53,000 crore investment announced in 2015-16 remained on paper. The CM admitted that while his government had opened a single window for investments, he discovered there were multiple openings in that one window — a dig at the bureaucracy, which allegedly views the summits as a means to feather its nest. 

Unlike Rajasthan, endowed with a well-maintained national highway network of approximately 205,000 km, MP’s roads have begun to deteriorate, recalling the pathetic condition they were in when Digvijay Singh demitted office in 2003. Once in power, the BJP government had repaired and restored the potholed roads. Second, although MP is power-surplus, producing 7,500 Mw as against the demand of 5,500 Mw, electricity tariffs are huge. The state has an estimated 500,000 unmetered connections and 241,000 unmetered distribution transformers that are tapped largely by the farmers. 

To Chouhan’s credit, he has ensured he remains unrivalled. In his years in power, he has morphed the BJP’s image from a party of small shopkeepers and traders to one that has a big space for the poor and the peasantry. 

Chouhan recognised what the Modi dispensation signified politically and ideologically. Instead of enhancing his reach-outs to the Muslims, he justified the recent encounter killing of eight detainees who were allegedly members of the outlawed Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and implored a crowd at a public meeting to express “solidarity” with the police action by a show of hands. His supremely powerful status is double-edged. Like Modi on the national stage, Chouhan’s face is deployed to court the voters even in a local poll. 

Fadnavis may be a rookie at governance but he learnt the ropes fast. From day one, he spoke of farmers and agriculture and not industry, which Maharashtra has come to be synonymous with. This chief minister may not endorse the alacrity with which his UP counterpart, Yogi Adityanath, waived farmers’ loans because for Fadnavis agriculture can become drought-proof if the paradigm moved from relief works to investments so that water structures and micro irrigation were expanded. Fadnavis stressed occasions that dependence on pure farming cannot exceed 25 to 30 per cent and, therefore, agro-industries needed to be encouraged. From hostel and food subsidies to tribal students and the children of farmers and registered labourers, health insurance and educating farmers about new agricultural techniques and floriculture, Fadnavis has them all. 

He paid his obeisance to the cow and the RSS by keeping one at his official residence and banning bovine slaughter under the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill shortly after coming to power. 

Khattar began his first spell in power by reneging on the promise of giving Haryana uninterrupted power through the day. The most charitable explanation for the disavowal was that as a former RSS “pracharak”, he did not know “how to lie artfully”. Indeed, Khattar’s artlessness was evident in what he said and did: In his zeal to enforce a ban on beef consumption, he asked Muslims to leave India if they found the decision unpalatable. He knows he owes his job to the RSS and has played the patron to his master by absorbing several Sangh members in the administration. The only positive feature of the Khattar dispensation is to date it is not singed by a scam, unusual for Haryana.

Content to bask in Modi’s glory, the Chhattisgarh CM is doing what he did in his previous stints, unveiling social schemes that include installing automated vending machines dispensing sanitary napkins in 1,500 government schools for girls. Singh has relinquished control over the administration of Naxal-affected Bastar region to the Centre. The BJP’s assessment was Chhattisgarh fell in the “uncertain” zone in the next elections because a one per cent swing makes the difference in a Congress-BJP binary system. Under a new state president, Bhupesh Baghel, even BJP sources conceded the Congress has a spring in its step.

Madhya Pradesh: Shivraj Singh Chouhan

• Most invincible CM of Madhya Pradesh to date; outdid Congress stalwarts DP Mishra, Shyama Charan Shukla and Arjun Singh in vanquishing rivals; famously said, “If I am CM for so many years, it is not because of someone’s obligation. I must have done something.” 

• MP’s “Mama”, everyone’s uncle and brother; cultivated an image of being humble and accessible, although in his present tenure, he reportedly remains aloof

• Has kept Modi, Shah and RSS reasonably pleased so far

• Scripted MP’s strides in agriculture

• Investment agenda faltered

• Control freak but bureaucracy often has its own way 

• Ghost of ‘Vyapam’ scam resulting from alleged serious irregularities in running the Professional Examination Board haunts him every now and then

BJP’s assessment: He will survive as long as the Congress party stays divided in the state

Rajasthan: Vasundhara Raje

• Her ‘Jai, Jai Rajasthan’ cri de coeur still resonates on the ground; aura of being distant in sync with her royal origin but she has discarded the ‘8 pm CM’ tag put on her in her first tenure when she refused to meet callers after sundown 

• Focused on industrial growth, especially in MSMEs, and bringing investments; effected labour reforms; created transparency and price certainty in land allotment; streamlined operational processes 

• Downsized preceding Congress government’s two main social sector schemes, Free Medicine and Diagnostics and Food Security, provoking flak from activists 

• Rejected notion of populism; believes people are moving away from entitlements to empowerment 

BJP’s assessment: Works but delivery and results not up to the cut. Isolated from party cadre and RSS and if she doesn’t watch out, they might not work for her in the Assembly elections. Only thing going for her is Congress state leader Sachin Pilot’s ascendancy not validated by older leaders

Chhattisgarh: Raman Singh

• The benign chawal (rice) wale baba, a moniker he earned after distributing rice through PDS that other states adopted 

• Interest-free agricultural loans, free lunch scheme for labourers, solar-powered pumps for farmers, incentives for entrepreneurs and nutritious food for pregnant women in anganwadi  centres have been received well 

• Divided Naxal-challenged Bastar region into seven districts, ostensibly to streamline administration but insurgency remains a problem 

• Blots include civil supply scam, deaths of women caused by botched sterilisation surgeries and alleged encounter killings in Bastar 

BJP’s assessment: Chhattisgarh is the trickiest state of the five to retain in the next election because a one percent swing ensures a win or causes a defeat. Although the opposition seems divided, the BJP is watching new state Congress president Bhupesh Baghel and his aggressive tactics inside the assembly and outside with keenness and trepidation

Maharashtra: Devendra Fadnavis

• BJP’s new poster boy and one of the youngest chief ministers, picked by Modi and Amit Shah 
• Began his tenure in September 2014 by coping with a serious drought but paid compensation to more than 85 per cent of farmers in six months; 

• Reduced number of permissions required for opening businesses from 76 to 26, simplified process of allotting farm land to set up factories 

• Simmering discontent among Marathas demanding reservation

BJP’s assessment: In appointing Fadnavis, Modi and Shah took a calculated risk because while he belongs to the numerically insignificant Brahmin community, they counted on his “youthfulness” and “dynamism” to deliver on the Maharashtra mandate. The verdict is Fadnavis has not disappointed the bosses so far but with two years to go for the elections, a repeat performance would depend on whether the Congress and NCP get their act together, and the extent to which he fulfils a pro-farmer agenda.
 

Haryana: Manohar Lal Khattar

• Former RSS ‘pracharak’, single, tech-savvy and, therefore, fits the Modi prototype of an “ideal” politician; 

• Set up a Good Governance Authority in every district, comprising professionals to oversee the administration, in collaboration with Ashoka University, Sonepat; predecessor B S Hooda alleged structure was a backroom way of sneaking in RSS activists; suspension, dismissal, public reprimand and other punitive actions followed; 

• Constituted Haryana Governance Reform Authority to facilitate land acquisition through mutual negotiations for projects. Acquisitions and growth projects hit by Jat protests  

• No attempt to water down his “anti-Jat” image because he wants to create a coalition of non-Jats; 

• Doesn’t meet BJP workers for fear he will have to oblige them with favours 

BJP’s assessment: Like Fadnavis, his anointment was thought of as “out-of-the-box”. Inability to come out of the ‘pracharak’ straitjacket might cost the party the next election