New Delhi: It was not an easy task to wrest Chhattisgarh from the Congress but PM Modi’s guarantees along with the sustained campaign by BJP workers to expose the Bhupesh Baghel government’s corruption turned the tables around, BJP state election in-charge leader Om Prakash Mathur said.
The BJP held agitations one after another which created a trust deficit among the people about Baghel and the people believed that Centre’s money for tribals, women and farmers was looted, he told ThePrint in an interview.
Known for delivering time and again with his organisational skills, the former RSS pracharak has a proven track record when it comes to elections — be it in Maharashtra (2014), Uttar Pradesh (2017) and, now, Chhattisgarh where the BJP was reduced to 15 seats five years ago.
Modi is said to bank on Mathur’s organisational skills since his days as the Gujarat chief minister and that was proven again by the task assigned to Mathur. The BJP posted a resounding victory with 54 seats in the 90-member Chhattisgarh assembly.
“In Chhattisgarh, it was a tough fight but we found several cases of anomalies and corruption — of the Bhupesh Baghel government — which were not challenged. Soon after (I) came to Chhattisgarh, we started a campaign against the corruption in liquor scam. The paper leak (campaign) got eyeballs and occupied the people’s imagination and started tarnishing Baghel’s image,” he said.
The BJP had handed over the charge of Chhattisgarh’s party affairs to Mathur in September 2022.
The party’s sustained anti-liquor campaign drew the attention of the women as Baghel did not impose prohibition as was promised before the 2018 assembly election, Mathur said. “The liquor scam was unearthed and several officials are still in jail. Tribal women protested against his (Baghel) liquor policy, and we started gaining the trust of women in the state.”
Congress leader and Raipur mayor’s brother Anwar Dhebar, Chhattisgarh State Marketing Corporation Limited MD Arun Pati Tripathi, IAS officer Anil Tuteja are among those arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with the liquor scam.
Another target for the BJP was those families who were deprived of the benefit of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, Mathur said.
“We made a strategy keeping in view 45 percent OBC and 32 percent tribals (in the state)… We found that the Baghel government has not released the state share of the PM Awas scheme despite three instalments from the Centre. Eight lakh families expecting homes were denied, (and) another four lakh eligible families were not included (in the scheme),” he said.
Booth workers and district presidents were instructed to contact these 12 lakh deprived beneficiaries, Mathur said, adding that the party then held agitations centering on who denied homes to the poor.
The party then went on to collect the entire data of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana for sensitising the beneficiaries that the prime minister takes care of their needs.
Once the poll manifesto was released, he said, the party then deployed its workers to help eligible beneficiaries fill up forms for the proposed Mahtari Vandan Yojana. The scheme envisages providing an annual financial assistance of Rs 12,000 to married women. “This created a buzz and several lakh women filled the forms.”
Mathur credited the hard work of the BJP workers and the PM pro-people schemes for the win in Chhattisgarh. “We won from the entire Surguja region (14 seats) and eight seats in Bastar. The PM’s guarantees and the sustained campaign by the BJP workers created a turnaround in Chhattisgarh, which was seen in Delhi as very difficult given the popular perception was with Bhupesh Baghel,” he said.
The sustained campaigns led to the people placing their trust in the Modi guarantees and Baghel tried to counter it by introducing the Bhupesh Par Bharosa programmes at the last moment, he said. “But, Modi guarantees created an impact over Bhupesh Par Bharosha.”
To a question on whether the party benefited by fighting collectively in Chhattisgarh, Mathur said: “It was a decision of the BJP parliamentary board not projecting anyone. In some states, we projected a face in earlier elections. It was a strategy. From the prime minister to the home minister, the aggressive campaign helped the party in achieving the goal.”
As for choosing the next chief minister in the central state, Mathur said it would be done through an established set of rules. “We have selected 54 new faces in Chhattisgarh, but choosing the chief minister is the prerogative of the parliamentary board. There is a system in BJP for selecting its face. The party sends its observers; they will meet MLAs; and then only, the parliamentary board decides on the final face,” he explained.
“It is the party which decides on a new face. There is no individual decision making process in the party, and everybody will accept the decision of the Parliamentary board,” he said to a similar query on the CM candidate in Rajasthan.
Mathur further ruled himself out of the race to become the leader to head the BJP government in Rajasthan. “I am above these posts. The party has given me many important responsibilities, and I have delivered on these challenges. Whatever responsibility the party will give in future, I will try to deliver,” the former Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: How BJP snatched Chhattisgarh’s tribal belts, Bastar & Surguja, from Congress