 "Shivraj Singh Chouhan")
Every Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister is said to be a Yogi Adityanath copycat, who has adopted his “governance model” to survive and earn brownie points with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh (RSS) and the BJP’s big guns.
Survival entails enacting rigorous laws to check religious conversions and prohibit inter-faith marriages, reading the riot Act to protestors and stone-pelters, and using the language of bullyboys. This is the most facile assumption on offer to explain Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s perceptible makeover from a liberal to an active proponent of hardcore Hindutva.
Chouhan’s present term is truncated because he stepped in a little over a year after he lost the 2018 Assembly polls to the Congress and later toppled the Kamal Nath dispensation after Jyotiraditya Scindia crossed over to the BJP with 22 Congress legislators and gave the party the majority it desperately sought. Chouhan emulated Adityanath in certain ways — he brought the Freedom to Religion Bill, 2020, a more stringent version of Uttar Pradesh’s Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance.
Like Adityanath, Chouhan threatened to pass a law that punished stone throwers with life imprisonment and allowed the demolition and/or auction of their homes. The warning was provoked by the communal clashes that erupted in the Malwa region where Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal activists went on yatras to collect funds for the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Stones were pelted on them who, in turn, attacked mosques and burnt Muslim homes. The administration’s response, according to some, was “one-sided”. It partially demolished Muslim houses soon after the riots, ostensibly to widen the roads, and allegedly let VHP and Bajrang Dal activists go scot-free.
In December 2020, in a public meeting at Babai (Hoshangabad district), Chouhan came down on land grabbers. His message was, “I am in a dangerous mood these days. I will not spare those who are involved in illegal activities. Leave the state, otherwise I will bury you 10 feet deep.” Other moves buttressed the sense that Chouhan — known for hosting Iftaar parties, wearing a skull cap, and organising mass nikaah for poor girls — had jettisoned the past. His government started legal proceedings against Netflix for showing scenes of kissing between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman at a Hindu temple in the series A Suitable Boy.
Rajneesh Agrawal, MP BJP spokesman, rejected the suggestion that Chouhan was a changed person and claimed: “He was always hard on the land mafia. In a previous stint, he declared he would go after them with a danda.” He dismissed the Chouhan-Adityanath likeness as a “figment of imagination”.
“The MP-UP political scenarios are different. In MP, it’s farmers, Dalits, and Adivasis who matter a lot, so sustaining a pro-poor image and doing pro-poor programmes are important. The CM is not communal but he doesn’t do appeasement politics,” he said.
Girija Shankar, a Bhopal-based political analyst and commentator, counted among the few scribes close to Chouhan had a different take. “It’s not about pursuing a hard or softline. For 15 months (from December 2018 to February 2020), Chouhan was out of power. That left a psychological impact. He’s worried that nothing amiss should happen in the next elections. He’s extraordinarily alert.”
Shankar ascribed the 2018 defeat to “election mismanagement and overconfidence”. “It’s not about losing SC/ST votes or those of farmers. How come the BJP did well in Baghelkhand and the Bhopal region?” Baghelkhand, which includes the Rewa, Satna, Shahdol, Sidhi and Singrauli districts, has a big backward caste and Dalit population. Of the 22 seats, the BJP won 19, and the Congress three. In the Bhopal belt, of the 25 seats, the BJP got 17 and the Congress seven.
A BJP source pinned down the below-par showing to the “absence of synergy between Chouhan and the party organisation”, a problem that allegedly persists in his present tenure. “The party organisation believed it was supreme and the CM owed his job to it. When the CM asserted his authority, the organisation didn’t take it well. There was sabotage in places,” the source said.
Additionally, this time Chouhan has to contend with the presence of Scindia. “Scindia’s people prop up Chouhan’s government in a sense, although some of them lost their seats in the by-polls. To an extent, that undermined Scindia’s clout and enhanced Chouhan’s because the BJP won the seats outside Scindia’s borough,” a source said.
The positive accruing from Chouhan’s pursuit of “hardline” politics was it rejuvenated the BJP cadre. “The cadre is pleased with him for dropping the (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee liberal-secular mask and going all out for Hindutva,” a Bhopal-based political observer remarked.
