Madhya Pradesh poll: Divided BJP battles voter fatigue, 'saffron' Congress

The November 17 assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh are as much a battle between the ruling BJP and its principal Opposition, the Congress party, as they are about a raging war within the saffron party.

Desperate to avenge the humiliation of its Kamal Nath-led government being toppled through engineered defections in March 2020 – within 15 months of coming to power following a 15-year hiatus – the Congress has mounted an atypically well-oiled campaign that is fiercely aggressive in its attacks at the ruling party, high on populist promises and woefully bereft of an ideological compass. On the other hand, the BJP, handicapped by the vagaries of voter fatigue, anti-incumbency and crippling factional feuds, seems focused almost entirely on undermining Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the state’s longest-serving chief minister.

High stakes battle

It is not that the election is devoid of real issues. There’s, in fact, no dearth of those – from the moral question over the undemocratic capture of power by the BJP to the rising instances of atrocities against women, Dalits and tribals in the state and from the familiar taints of corruption against Chouhan in virtually every sphere of governance to the pan-India crises of rising prices, stifling farmer distress and spiralling unemployment.

Yet, if this litany of issues appears only incidental to the polls for MP’s 230-member Vidhan Sabha, it is because the impending electoral battle features satraps on either side of the state’s largely bipolar political divide; the stakes equally high for each of them – perhaps even more than the parties they represent.

For Chouhan, who almost single-handedly turned MP into one of BJP’s strongest electoral citadels in the country long before the party moulded itself into a monolithic appendage of the Narendra Modi cult; the ensuing poll battle is his most challenging since he was first parachuted to the CM’s chair in November 2005 by then BJP president LK Advani.

Architect of the BJP’s consecutive poll victories in the state in 2008 and 2013, Chouhan could once boast of being shielded by the same Teflon armour that has held Modi in good stead against acerbic attacks by his political rivals. Over the 18 years that he served Madhya Pradesh as CM, multiple accusations, including those of massive corruption in the VYAPAM and sand mining scams, were hurled at Chouhan by his rivals but none eroded his credibility with the electorate. Even when the BJP was voted out of power in December 2018 after fighting the MP election with Chouhan as its CM face, the party polled a marginally higher percentage of votes than the victorious Congress, which stopped shy of wresting a simple majority in the assembly, winning 114 seats against the BJP’s 109 seats.

Challenges galore

Yet, Chouhan who faces the electorate now seems like a caricature of his past self. The predictable barrage of criticism he faces from Congress aside, Chouhan also has to fend off the fast-gaining perception that his party is out to demolish him. Not only has the BJP refused to project him as its CM face in the current election, but the prime minister has also refused to even mention Chouhan’s name in recent rallies and events.

That Modi, the BJP’s undisputed mascot for national and state elections, feels no compulsion to humour Chouhan any longer had become clear when the party began announcing its candidates for the polls a month ago. Chouhan’s name did not figure in the first three lists of candidates declared by the party triggering rumours that he may even be benched altogether. His name figured only in the fourth list, which was declared while Chouhan was busy posting videos on social media platforms featuring him sitting alongside the Ganges in Rishikesh and scribbling on a notepad, days after he told a gathering of women in his home district of Sehore in MP that they would miss their Mama (maternal uncle; the moniker Chouhan is addressed by in the state) “when I am gone”.

Big gamble

The BJP’s perplexing strategy of fielding several central leaders, Union ministers and sitting Lok Sabha MPs, including Chouhan-baiters like Prahlad Patel and Kailash Vijayvargiya, has been viewed in political circles at large as a definite sign of the BJP high command drawing curtains on the four-term CM’s unchallenged reign in state politics.

The Congress has had a free run exploiting this churn in the BJP, with Kamal Nath and his colleagues claiming that the CM had lost the confidence not just of the state's electorate but also of his party.

It is difficult to decipher if there is any method behind the madness that is unfolding in the BJP in MP. Ruling party members have been busy explaining that central leaders were forced to contest state elections as they have clout in different regions and among different caste groups and that though Chouhan had run a good government, it was now time for transition.

It may be a tad premature to brush aside such arguments as codswallop but it is equally true that none of the Union ministers and MPs fielded by the BJP for the polls, including the likes of Narendra Singh Tomar, Patel, Vijayvargiya, Riti Pathak and Faggan Singh Kulaste, have a mass base that can match Chouhan’s nor the credentials of being good administrators.

Tough task

While Chouhan has his battles to fight, both against the Congress and the changing order of things within his party, his main challenger – Kamal Nath – has an equally tough task ahead. When Nath took over as the Madhya Pradesh chief minister in December 2018, trumping then colleague Jyotiraditya Scindia, he had had an immensely successful four-decade-long career in national politics.

The long innings he had served as Union minister for key portfolios had built his credentials as an able administrator of the state – something most MP bureaucrats acknowledged during Nath’s short stint as CM. Yet, the machinations of state-level power politics were never his strong suit. So when Scindia and nearly two dozen MLAs loyal to him switched over to the BJP in March 2020, hoodwinking even Congress veteran and two-term former CM Digvijaya Singh, Nath stepped down from the CM’s chair without putting up any real fight. What goes to Nath’s credit, though, is that after losing power he told his party bosses in Delhi that he would remain in Bhopal and strengthen the party organisation to ensure the Congress’ return to power. This stunned many political observers who were eager to wager a bet that the Chhindwara strongman would soon tire of state politics and make an excuse to return to Delhi – after all, he had, a source close to him told The Federal, an “open offer” from then interim Congress chief Sonia Gandhi to take up a key role in the party nationally.

With his old friend Digvijaya Singh by his side, Nath spent the past three years rebuilding the party at the grassroots level in MP – relentlessly touring the state, particularly the so-called Scindia fiefdom of Gwalior-Chambal, identifying candidates to electorally challenge those who had betrayed the Congress in March 2020, and marshalling the vast monetary resources he commands to highlight failures of the Chouhan-led government while simultaneously building Brand Kamal Nath.

Embracing Hindutva

In his quest for returning to power, Nath also chose a path that is at odds with everything the Congress claims it stands for. His overt display of his Hanuman-bhakt identity, open embrace of controversial and brazenly communal Hindu godman like Dhirendra Shastri, silence on sectarian violence that targeted Muslims in MP’s Khandwa two years ago and his recurring flirtations with the votaries of cow vigilantism, such as members of the Bajrang Sena have visibly pushed a centrist and supposedly secular Congress on a Hindu-right trajectory.

Nath may have convinced himself and his colleagues that the only way to fight the BJP is by becoming one version of the saffron party but the transformation is bound to irk – and has irked – not just Congress leaders elsewhere but also Congress allies in the Opposition’s INDIA coalition. Nath’s unilateral announcement of cancelling a joint INDIA rally that was to take place in Bhopal earlier this month left the Congress embarrassed and several constituents of the Opposition bloc incensed. That Nath has still had his way, perhaps, shows that the Congress’ central leadership is in no mood to intervene in the duplicitous functioning of its MP unit, at least for now, in the hope that the former nine-term MP’s strategy would propel the party back to power in the state next month.

No free ride

If the 76-year-old Nath has staked his all for the upcoming election, the 52-year-old who was key to the BJP’s plan for dethroning the Congress veteran over three years ago isn’t enjoying a free ride either. Jyotiraditya Scindia may have earned a fancy cabinet portfolio for himself as a reward for toppling Nath’s government but the BJP is in no mood to offer any free lunches to its Union civil aviation minister.

Scindia’s induction into the BJP, along with his loyalists – seven of whom were also made ministers in Chouhan’s state cabinet – has given the BJP more headaches than comfort in the past three years. The BJP may have enjoyed the fruits of a stolen mandate but it has been fending off internal strife by old-timers who are riled over their electoral turf being infested by the interlopers Scindia delivered to the BJP.

Several BJP leaders with various degrees of electoral influence, curiously including some once close to Scindia, have made their way to the Congress in recent months and more are likely to join in the coming weeks. Scindia, who has never contested an assembly election and had lost his family seat of Guna in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls to the BJP when he was still with the Congress, is reportedly being forced by his new political bosses to contest the coming elections.

Chouhan had positioned himself during the first 15 years of his chief ministerial tenure as a moderate in the BJP’s Hindutva pantheon but was forced to transform himself into a muscular Hindu-right leader in the vein of Yogi Adityanath, if not Modi, in his final term. Scindia too has had to reorient himself after joining the BJP. If he preferred royal appellations of ‘Shrimant’ and ‘Maharaj’ during his days in the Congress, a party with high endurance for a feudal hangover, Scindia has had to grin and bear being addressed with the socially equalising title of ‘bhaisaheb’ – or just Scindia ji – during his run in the BJP; and that’s only a mild slight by his new colleagues, some of whom have publicly called him names that can’t be reproduced in print.

Scindia may have succeeded in getting most of his loyalists re-nominated as candidates for the impending election but it is an open secret that nearly all of them are facing resistance, if not outright sabotage, by BJP old-timers who they have replaced in the poll fray. It is not too difficult to imagine what Scindia’s fate in the BJP would be if a chunk of his loyalists fail at the hustings and that’s an eventuality that, irrespective of whether MP is won by the BJP or the Congress, would give solace to both Chouhan and Nath.