Governance, not caste: The investment strategy that keeps CMs in power

Glib talk of caste explains only part of why some chief ministers stay in power for decades

Why do some chief ministers come to power ruling for decades, while others go home at the end of their term, sometimes never to be heard of again? In other words, what constitutes the political capital of a chief minister? And what gives them a place in history books? 

Caste arbitrage to secure the top state job is passe, as explanations go. Ramakrishna Hegde got the job as chief minister of Karnataka because he was an unthreatening Brahmin in a landscape dominated by the clash of powerful and ambitious Vokkaligas and Lingayats. Jayalalithaa got it despite being a Brahmin in a state like Tamil Nadu, where opposition to Brahminism was a political ideology. This kind of politics can get you one spell in the job. But more than one term depends, almost entirely, on what you’ve done in your first term. 

Take Bihar, where polls have just been announced. Till today, Nitish Kumar and his supporters like to claim he is “Sushasan Babu”, a description he gave to himself in his first full five-year tenure (technically second because he became chief minister for the first time from March 3 to March 10, 2000, but that was only a nominal stint) from 2005 to 2010. He told Business Standard how he found only Remington typewriters and paper strewn on the floor of the chief minister’s secretariat when he entered his office. He wrote out his first order by hand and copied it manually on another piece of paper because there was no carbon. The Economist wrote in 2004: “Bihar … has become a byword for the worst of India: of widespread and inescapable poverty; of corrupt politicians indistinguishable from the mafia dons they patronise; of a caste-ridden social order that has retained the worst feudal cruelties; of terrorist attacks by groups of ‘Naxalite’ Maoists; of chronic misrule that has allowed infrastructure to crumble, the education and health systems to collapse, and law and order to evaporate.” 

Bihar’s turnaround story is too well documented to bear repetition here. But most of the moves in Nitish Kumar’s first term were administrative and caste-neutral: Reviving the state-owned Bihar Bridge Construction Corporation (which eventually posted profit), pushing it to build bridges in a state where floods are routine occurrences.  New schools were built and plans were made to hire 200,000 new teachers with funding from the World Bank. Key medical services like radiological and pathological testing were outsourced to private parties with subsidies for low-income groups. The Bihar State Electricity Board was reorganised with generation and distribution reform. Having got one term, in his second, he consolidated: A scheme offering free bicycles to girls, the recognition that women could be better administrators, and reserving positions for them in running schools …. The net result? His appeal as an administrator continues to strike a chord among voters. Much of this work was done in his first term. 

Jyoti Basu, the longest-serving chief minister of West Bengal, achieved much of what he is remembered for today, between 1977 and 1982. Land reforms and Operation Barga — recording the names of sharecroppers (bargadars), which protected them from eviction from land and ensured they received their rightful share of the crop — brought the Communist Party of India (Marxist), part of the Left Front, to power repeatedly, and Basu was the man whom the bloc trusted the most to lead the government. Land that was above the legal ceiling was also vested in the state and redistributed to landless peasants, creating a natural constituency. As chief minister, he piloted the first decision of his Cabinet: That all political prisoners be set free. A few investments. Decades of power. 

Chandrababu Naidu’s administrative acumen is well known. But people forget some of his crucial social welfare interventions. As far back as 1999, in his first term, he launched the Deepam scheme: Providing gas stoves to women along with one million gas cylinder connections. The World Bank noted that his administration prioritised economic reform, infrastructure, and technology over large-scale welfare populism. While that cost him electoral setbacks, it was also the route for instant brand recall and he’s still there, living to fight another day, 30 years after the launch of his Telugu Desam Party, following the toppling of the government of his father-in-law, N T Rama Rao. 

Glib talk about caste equations can only explain a part of it: But deconstruct successive election victories and somewhere the anchor will be the administration the government provided in its first term. Falter on this front — and you lose.