BJP's strategy has been to pick outsiders as CM: Will Delhi buck the trend?

With a couple of exceptions, most of the party's CM picks across states since 2014 have been candidates who are not from the dominant demographic in that state

At least since the Haryana and Jharkhand Assembly polls of 2014, barring a couple of exceptions in subsequent years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has consistently surprised political pundits with its picks for state chief ministers.

 

In almost all instances, save 2017 when Yogi Adityanath became the Uttar Pradesh CM instead of Manoj Sinha, as was widely expected, the imprint of the party’s central leadership has been evident in the selection of the CMs. Whether that pattern will be repeated in Delhi, where the BJP’s 48 elected legislators are meeting to elect their leader, will be known by this evening. In the face of intense speculation, their choice could once again come as a surprise.

 

 

Over the decade-and-a-half, the BJP has sought to follow a few cardinal principles in picking its chief ministerial faces, whether after securing an Assembly poll win or when it replaced its CMs mid-term to beat perceived anti-incumbency.

 

First, it has picked its the CM from among elected legislators, resisting the temptation to parachute leaders who were either Members of Parliament, or would need to be elected in a bypoll. The party has surprised people by nominating first term MLAs – Manohar Lal Khattar, who became the Haryana CM in 2014, Rajasthan’s Bhajan Lal Sharma in 2023 and Biplab Deb in Tripura in 2018, are leading examples. In Gujarat in 2021, a year ahead of Assembly elections in the state, the BJP replaced Vijay Rupani with Bhupendra Patel, a first-term MLA.

 

Second, the BJP’s CM picks have been reflected an effort to go beyond intra-party camps, even at the risk of ignoring veteran leaders and their proteges.

 

This was the case when it nominated Mohan Yadav as the Madhya Pradesh CM, Sharma as the Rajasthan CM, and Vishnu Deo Sai as the Chhattisgarh CM in December 2023. In Rajasthan, it ignored veteran Vasundhara Raje’s claims despite her getting the support of at least 40 of the newly-elected MLAs. In 2017, the BJP nominated Jai Ram Thakur, who was not aligned with either of the two major camps in the party, as the Himachal Pradesh CM.

 

Third, whenever it could, the BJP has elected a CM who does not belong to that state’s dominant castes, a move that flew in the face of received electoral wisdom.

 

For example, in Maharashtra, when the BJP emerged the single largest party in 2014, it appointed Devendra Fadnavis as its CM. Fadnavis is a Brahmin and was the first non-Maratha to become the state’s CM since Manohar Joshi (1995-99). It again picked Fadnavis as its CM after the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly polls, after an interregnum where it was part of the Shiv Sena’s Eknath Shinde-led government. Shinde is a Maratha, as is Ajit Pawar, both now deputy CMs under Fadnavis.

 

Similarly, in 2014, when the party picked the Punjabi Khattar as Haryana CM, he was termed an 'outsider' in the Jat-dominated state. His selection marked the first time in 18 years that the state had a non-Jat CM. In March 2024, with the Haryana Assembly polls months away, the BJP replaced Khattar with Nayab Singh Saini, an OBC and someone from a non-dominant caste in the state.  

 

The same year, the BJP won in Jharkhand, appointing Raghubar Das as the CM, making him the first non-tribal head of the state since its creation in 2000. In Chhattisgarh in 2023, the BJP picked Sai, a tribal in an effort to consolidate its support base among the Scheduled Tribes which have traditionally voted for the Congress. Months later, in June 2024, the BJP again picked a tribal, Mohan Charan Majhi, as its Odisha CM.

 

And fourth, the BJP, whenever it has felt the political compulsion, has departed from its own convention of picking ‘Sangh Parivaar' insiders. It made exceptions in Assam in 2016 when it picked Sarbananda Sonowal and in 2021, when Himanta Biswa Sarma was picked as the CM of the north-eastern state. In Manipur, when it won in 2017, the BJP nominated N Biren Singh as its CM. Sonowal earned his political stripes in the All Assam Students Union, as did Sarma. The latter also spent several years in the Congress, as had Singh.

 

One key demographic, however, has never made it to the BJP's list of CMs since it came to power at the Centre: Women. Since 2014, the BJP not picked a woman as a chief minister after an Assembly election win. Anandiben Patel became the Gujarat CM in 2014, but she merely succeeded Narendra Modi when he was elected the prime minister. While Patel hails from the dominant Patidar community, Vijay Rupani, who hails from the Bania community, replaced her later. The BJP sacked Rupani in 2021, a year before the Assembly polls in the state, making Bhupendra Patel, a first-term MLA from the Patidar community, the CM.

 

The method in the BJP’s CM picks became apparent once the party secured a single-party majority under Narendra Modi in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, and Amit Shah took over as the party’s national chief later that year. But that wasn’t the case in the Assembly polls held in December 2013, the first occasion that Modi was the party’s lead campaigner.

 

In mid-2013, Modi was announced as the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 polls, and led the party’s December 2013 Assembly polls. The BJP retained power in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the incumbent chief ministers, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh continued. In Rajasthan, the BJP unseated the Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government, and Vasundhara Raje, the party’s most prominent leader, became the CM. Ten years later, in December 2023, when the BJP won all three states, none of its three veteran leaders were considered for the top post. The BJP appointed Sai, a tribal as its Chhattisgarh CM, while Yadav became the MP CM, succeeding Chouhan, who was later accommodated in the Union Cabinet. In Rajasthan, the party ignored Vasundhara Raje’s claims, for whose candidature at least 40 party legislators had announced support, and picked first-term MLA Sharma instead.

 

However, there have have been exceptions when the party has persisted with dominant castes, as in Uttarakhand, where all its three CMs since 2017 – Trivendra Rawat, Tirath Singh Rawat and Pushkar Singh Dhami – have been Thakurs, the state’s dominant caste. UP CM Yogi Adityanath remains the only outlier who has continued in the saddle since 2017 despite not having been his party leadership's first choice to helm the country's most politically crucial state.