One, this shows the survival or maybe the last hurrah of the old generation. Second, these elections show how strategies of the BJP contrast with those of the Congress. Third, these elections will determine the future — both of the BJP-led NDA and the INDIA alliance. Fourth, this will be an electoral test of the politics of giveaways or welfare measures. And five, the prominence of women voters in these five elections.
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Who will be the leader?
First of all, see the leadership in all four states. KCR, in Telangana, is 69. He is the chief ministerial candidate of his party and there’s no challenge. If he does get elected, it’s most unlikely that he will stand for elections again at the age of 74 because in five years, it would be time for him to make a call on his succession. And if he does not win this time, then it’s even less likely that he’ll be the candidate the next time.
Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh waited for the longest time. The BJP hasn’t quite said he’s the chief ministerial candidate, but is at least putting him in front. And right now, in Chhattisgarh, he’s the most preeminent leader from the BJP, and he’s 71. In any case, by the next election, he would have also crossed the BJP’s own 75-year limit.
Vasundhara Raje, in Rajasthan, is 70. This is again her last election.
At the same time, in Chhattisgarh, as well as Rajasthan, the BJP has not put up a younger candidate to rival its older leader. This affirms the idea that this election also shows the resilience of the older generation.
In Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot is 72. Unlikely he’ll have another election. He had a challenger in the form of Sachin Pilot. So, the Congress party had a younger leader in the state, but preferred to go with an older leader instead.
Again, in Madhya Pradesh, the leader is not that old. Shivraj Singh Chouhan is 64. It just looks like he’s been there for a very long time. A four-term chief minister, the likelihood of him coming up for a fifth term is not very high. This also looks like his last innings, his last shot at power.
And the BJP, in Madhya Pradesh, had younger leaders. It had, for example, Jyotiraditya Scindia, but it has not fielded him in the state elections. The BJP can’t say that he’s a central leader; it has fielded seven sitting MPs including three serving central ministers in this election campaign, but they haven’t fielded Scindia because he would have been seen immediately as a challenger to Shivraj Singh Chouhan. The BJP has its senior most leader leading the party without saying that he is the chief ministerial candidate.
If one looks at the Congress party, a key leader in Madhya Pradesh is Digvijaya Singh, 76, who’s campaigning. He has a key role in ticket distribution but more important than that, is Kamal Nath. Among all the leaders in this election campaign (if I take out Mizoram), Kamal Nath is the oldest of the senior candidates — he will turn 77 in a few weeks, in November. The Congress party preferred him to any younger leaders in Madhya Pradesh.
In fact, we don’t even see many younger leaders in Madhya Pradesh and the Congress has let Kamal Nath build the party. He had the biggest say in the distribution of tickets. If he wins power, then most likely, there will be a successor groomed for him going ahead.
One important thing is that both Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh already have their sons in politics. Kamal Nath’s son is an MP; he won the only seat the Congress won in 2019 in Madhya Pradesh — the traditional family seat of Chhindwara which Kamal Nath used to win. And Digvijaya Singh’s son is an MLA. Both their next generations are ready but not quite succession-ready as yet.
Chhattisgarh is a slightly mixed picture because the incumbent Bhupesh Baghel, who’s now been put up for re-election by the Congress party, he’s quite young by the standards of Indian politics. He’s 62 and the older leader, T.S. Singh Deo — who’s been his challenger — probably has his last opportunity to contest and doesn’t look like he’s in the leadership race.
In Mizoram, the incumbent chief minister of the MNF, 79-year-old Zoramthanga, used to be a fighter in the Mizo underground for a long time. Even his challenger from the Congress party, Lalsawta, is 77.
Our conclusion is that this election sees the resilience of the older generation in many ways. This is the election of leaders above 70 years of age.
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What is the strategy?
Next, contrasting strategies. In the past, the Congress was a high command-run party; states had no power. The BJP had a high command but it had strong state leaders who determined many things for themselves. And that’s why Vasundhara Raje emerged in Rajasthan, Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, Rajnath Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Devendra Fadnavis, and earlier Nitin Gadkari, in Maharashtra.
That is not the situation anymore. The BJP has now doubled up on becoming a high command-run party like the Congress. The Congress, on the other hand, is becoming a less high command-run party. It’s a bit like the BJP has tried to mould itself in the image and style of the old high command style of the Congress and the Congress is trying to evolve in the style of the loose-high-command, strong-state-units style of the old BJP.
In Madhya Pradesh, the Congress party from the very beginning left no doubt that Kamal Nath was their chief ministerial candidate. They did not even have to announce it, the local leaders themselves started saying that “Kamal Nath is our future chief minister”. The Congress high command never contested or denied this.
The BJP gave Shivraj Singh Chouhan a ticket to contest but even now, the party is not willing to say that he will be their chief ministerial candidate. He himself can’t say it nor can any of his supporters, even the BJP has said Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be the face of the party.
In the letter he wrote to the electorate in Madhya Pradesh, the Prime Minister said give me ‘direct support’ as you did in 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. So, he’s seeking the vote for himself and the ticket distribution, etc. has been done by the party high command, which based its judgement on inputs from local leaders or agencies or maybe surveys. But these are not decisions of the state unit of the BJP.
While Kamal Nath has been left unchallenged by the Congress party in Madhya Pradesh, it looks as if a whole bunch of rivals of Shivraj Singh Chouhan have been fielded including Kailash Vijayvargiya, the powerful national general secretary. He has been fielded, along with three central ministers, Narendra Singh Tomar, Prahlad Patel and Faggan Singh Kulaste.
Let’s come to Rajasthan now and see if it passes this test. The Congress has let Gehlot be, if anything, it has controlled Sachin Pilot, who has spoken less and less lately. Gehlot had a key role in deciding who gets the tickets, because ultimately the one who determines who gets the tickets in an election is the leader of the party in that state.
In the BJP’s case, a lot of it again has happened from the high command. Vasundhara Raje, who is the most preeminent BJP leader in the state, kept waiting till the end for her own nomination. While, initially, a lot of her loyalists had been left out, a few have been accommodated in the final list.
At one point, the BJP even left out the late Bhairon Singh Shekhawat’s son-in-law Narpat Singh Rajvi. Shekhawat, who rose to be the Vice President of India, was among the strongest and the most respected leaders of the BJP in the era of Vajpayee and Advani. He was also a former chief minister of Rajasthan.
His son-in-law, Rajvi, was left out in the first list and his constituency of Vidyadhar Nagar was given to Diya Kumari, the princess of the royal family of Jaipur and the sitting MP from Rajsamand. It looked like the BJP was sidelining the Vasundhara Raje stream of royalty, that is a Dholpur family, and bringing in the Jaipur family. That led to a sizable revolt in the BJP and Rajvi himself made a very strong statement, without naming Diya Kumari.
He said: “The party has been very kind to those who went down on their knees before the Mughals; the party has also been very generous to those who fought against Maharana Pratap; the lifelong service rendered by the late Bhairon Singh Shekhawat is now being rejected.”
Rajvi was finally accommodated and given yet another seat. Once again, the decision-making was done from the Centre.
In Telangana, the BJP had a state chief who was quite popular, and also controversial and abrasive, Bandi Sanjay Kumar. The party was under pressure from Eatala Rajender, who had just come from the BRS, and also under the pressure of those in the BJP who found Bandi Sanjay too abrasive. He was dropped and G. Kishan Reddy was sent from the Centre.
For the Congress, on the other hand, its state chief Revanth Reddy, is no less controversial, no less abrasive. A delegation of dissidents came to meet Mallikarjun Kharge, the Congress president who spoke with Reddy. I believe he counselled him and told the dissidents to calm down.
Then, in Chhattisgarh, it looked like the BJP would follow exactly the policy that they are following in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh — not to field any prominent leader. At the very last moment, they fielded Raman Singh.
These five years, they never said Raman Singh was their leader in Chhattisgarh. But finally, when he filed his nomination, Union Home Minister Amit Shah landed up in Chhattisgarh.
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NDA vs INDIA alliance
The third important point is that these elections will determine the future of both the NDA and the INDIA alliance.
If the Opposition — that is the Congress, in this case — does very well in these states, that will give strength to the INDIA alliance. It will burnish the Congress’s credentials for leadership of the alliance.
And if the BJP does brilliantly in these and sweeps maybe four states by itself, then its need for strengthening the NDA or rediscovering old partners will decline. That can have an adverse impact on the NDA.
But if the BJP does very poorly in these four state elections, then the party may feel that it could fall short of seats in the coming general elections, and may reconsider reuniting with old allies.
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Electoral test for ‘Revdi’ culture
Next, it will be the electoral test of giveaways (‘revdis’ or freebies).
For some time now, the Congress and opposition parties have been promising a lot of giveaways. It happened in Karnataka and looks like it worked. They’ve done so in Telangana as well. In Madhya Pradesh, they’ve handed out a lot of welfare subsidies. And in Rajasthan, the Congress has promised the cheapest LPG, return to the old pension scheme, etc.
The BJP or Prime Minister Modi, for some time, was critical of what he called a ‘revdi’ culture in politics. He hasn’t talked about it lately, which is significant. Has he begun to worry that this is working for the Opposition?
If it looks like this politics of giveaways works, the BJP may also make a complete shift in its own stance going into the general elections.
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The women vote
Number five, the women factor. In this campaign, the BJP is making a really big deal of the women’s reservation bill because they want women’s vote. They are also talking about welfare schemes, especially those directed towards women, particularly in Madhya Pradesh. After Karnataka, the Congress too is targeting women voters in every state going to the polls.
It is only in Madhya Pradesh that the BJP matched the Congress, scheme for scheme, since the fight is over the women vote.
The BJP, at this point, lacks a strong woman campaigner. There is Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan but she’s been kept out of mainstream campaigning for some time. In the past, it had Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharti.
The Congress does have Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, which tilts the equation a little bit.
Why has the women’s vote become more important? Because over time, we have seen that more women are coming out to vote than men. Look at the three Lok Sabha elections of 2009, 2014 and 2019 – the percentage of women voters has been going up.
And the turnout in 2019 is what changed the picture and everybody now realised that the women’s vote was very important.
One must also see the voting percentage for men and women for various parties, at least for the three relevant states in the Hindi heartland: Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
In Madhya Pradesh, though the BJP swept the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, 54 percent men and 45 percent women who voted, voted for them. In Rajasthan, it was 58 percent men and 53 percent women. And in Chhattisgarh, it was the opposite – 29 percent men and 38 percent women.
The BJP would be very keen to bridge this equation in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
This is the edited transcript of ThePrint Cut The Clutter Episode 1339, published on 31 October 2023, on the five key trends emerging from poll-bound Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan & Mizoram.
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