State scan: Ajit Jogi may hold the trump card in Chhattisgarh polls 2018

Back in 1998, a telephone call from the then Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo, Kanshi Ram, to then Congress stalwart Ajit Jogi became a matter of much talk in undivided Madhya Pradesh.

Kanshi Ram wanted Jogi to quit the Congress and join his party. He was offered the post of party president. However, fearful of losing her heft in the BSP, Mayawati stoutly opposed the plan and this prevented Jogi from leaving the Congress and make public his differences with Digvijaya Singh, a Congressman and then chief minister of the state. 

This worked well for Jogi for a while because he got a chance to be chief minister of Chhattisgarh when the state was formed in 2000. Thereafter, he fell out with the leadership and left the party. Now Jogi has got an opportunity to get back at the Congress by thwarting its effort to form an alliance with the BSP in Chhattisgarh. His Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC), floated in June 2016, will have an alliance with the BSP in the Assembly polls, due later this year. 

Mayawati has hinted she is not keen to join the grand alliance against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the national level. Besides, she is working towards dampening the Congress’ prospects in the polls.

With the party’s vote share being below 1 percentage point less than that of the BJP in the last assembly elections, the Congress was looking to trounce its principal rival, which been in power since 2003. The state, otherwise bipolar, will now see a three-cornered contest.

The difference between the vote share of the BJP and that of the Congress has progressively declined from 2.5 percentage points in 2003 to 1.7 percentage points in 2008 to just 0.75 percentage points in 2013. 

The BSP had got 4.27 per cent of the votes polled in 2013, declining from 6.12 per cent in 2008. While Congress leaders were holding back from giving what they called their winning seats to the BSP, Jogi moved in to scuttle its plans.

With the initial reports suggesting no major gain for the BJP in the tribal seats, which number 29 in the House of 90, the 10 seats reserved for the scheduled castes (SC) would hold the key to power. Of the 10 seats, the BJP won nine in 2013.

The alliance of the BSP with the JCC comes as a relief to the BJP. Apart from the BSP, Jogi too holds considerable sway among the scheduled caste population in the state. The JCC will contest in 55 seats and the BSP in 35. 

“The JCC has allotted eight strong scheduled-caste seats to the BSP and, with its backing, it threatens to split anti-BJP votes,” says political observer Dhanvendra Jaiswal. 

State Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel said the parties (BSP and JCC) had been helping the BJP and were now doing it openly. “We are least bothered,” Baghel said, adding that the BSP was supposed to ally with the Congress but succumbed to BJP pressure because the CBI-ED is investigating Mayawati’s assets.

Jogi has countered this by saying the Congress is not capable enough and the alliance is the only way to stop the BJP, whose tenure is a tale of “corruption and misrule”. 

The BJP is confident of a fourth term. “The tri-angular contest will help the BJP and we are set to gain more seats,” said Dharamlal Kaushik, BJP state president. 

However, tension in the Congress could subside with a few other political pundits saying this would be no cakewalk for the BJP either. 

“The electoral outcome would largely depend on how much Jogi and his ally eat into the Congress votes,” Sudeep Tripathi, political observer, said.  Anti-incumbency is also a factor that cannot be ignored, he added.

Above all, if the alliance manages to get a good number of seats, a hung assembly is a distinct possibility in a small state like Chhattisgarh. If that happens, Jogi gets a chance to call the shots.