Chhattisgarh polls 2023: Why rudderless BJP may find it tough to take on CM Baghel’s might

With assembly elections due in Chhattisgarh next month, Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and his rivals in the BJP, including his predecessor Raman Singh, have been firing salvos at each other. The war of words, though, has little to do with the performance of the ruling Congress, which had stormed to power in the state with an absolute majority in December 2018, ending the BJP’s 15-year uninterrupted reign.

Instead, the churlish verbal duel, raging now for the past two days, is over Baghel’s penchant for Candy Crush, a popular mobile phone game, which he was photographed playing while attending a party meeting chaired by the Congress’ Chhattisgarh in-charge, Kumari Selja, ostensibly to assess poll preparations.

That the head of a government and leaders of his principal Opposition are trading barbs over the former’s love for a mobile game, perhaps, reveals more about the contours of the contest in Chhattisgarh than any analysis by pollsters who painstakingly audit a government’s performance to predict electoral outcomes.

Congress confident

Long before it started making voluble assertions of its victory in Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Rajasthan – other states where elections will be held next month – the Congress had been confident of retaining power in Chhattisgarh.

The rambunctious claims of an imminent victory are despite the party being beset by internal turmoil owing to a protracted but presently dormant turf war between Baghel and his deputy, TS Singh Deo, and the government’s continuing battle against charges of corruption in liquor sales, mineral fund utilisation, recruitments and coal transportation, besides recurring instances of unrest over visible corporate expansion into tribal-dominated protected forest areas of north and south Chhattisgarh.

Yet, if despite these myriad challenges, Baghel has the luxury to indulge in his passion for Candy Crush – something he admits to do religiously after meals or even while driving to key meetings – while Selja predicts a Congress victory on 75 of the state’s 90 assembly seats, it is, arguably, due to a combination of two key factors. First, palpable popularity of Baghel’s welfare schemes that craftily tap into not livelihood aspirations while simultaneously massaging regional pride and second, a rudderless BJP that is atypically struggling with organisational inertia since its shock defeat five years ago.

BJP lacks alternative

Raman Singh, during the 15 years of his chief ministerial tenure between 2003 and 2018, had built himself up as an affable and accessible leader who was alive to the vast livelihood challenges that his state, abundant in natural mineral wealth but economically impoverished and hostage to Naxalite violence, struggled with.

With a plethora of welfare schemes that were aimed at reducing financial distress of individuals and households, most notably his government’s universal distribution of rice at Re 1/kg (in 2013 – down from Rs 2/kg in 2008) to households which earned him the moniker ‘Chawur Wale Baba’, Singh had ruled Chhattisgarh for three terms with relative ease.

What further helped him consolidate support for the BJP was the unstinted support he received from the party’s central leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani and a robust party organisation in Chhattisgarh. The BJP, under Singh in Chhattisgarh then, was a stark contrast from the heavily fractured Congress that was torn between camps led by stalwarts such as Ajit Jogi, VC Shukla, Mahendra Karma and Nandkumar Patel.

Shukla, Karma and Patel fell victim to the Jhiram Ghati massacre of Congress members by Naxalites in May 2013 while Jogi was eventually sacked from the Congress and floated his own outfit, the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC).

Interestingly, circumstances preceding the ensuing Chhattisgarh elections are a reversal of the political scenarios that made and marred the BJP and the Congress, respectively, until 2018. With the Atal-Advani era now a fading memory in the BJP’s history, Singh – like Shivraj Singh Chouhan in MP and Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan – finds himself sidelined within a party tightly controlled by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. And, like in the case of Rajasthan and MP, the BJP has dwarfed a stalwart before it could prop up a credible alternative leader or leadership at the state-level.

Baghel in control

In contrast, like Raman Singh between 2003 and 2018, Baghel now is in firm control of his party in the state – backed to the hilt by the Congress high command even when he reportedly violated his promise to Rahul Gandhi of vacating the CM’s chair in favour of Singh Deo after completing two and a half years in office.

Singh Deo, a diehard party loyalist and Baghel’s senior in the party, had to eventually bury the hatchet and accept the post of deputy CM earlier this year. Another Baghel critic, Mohan Markam, was eased out as Chhattisgarh Congress chief and replaced with Deepak Baij two months ago.

Baghel has also spent the past five years building himself as a bankable brand in Chhattisgarh politics. The CM didn’t just follow his predecessor’s template for social welfare but improvised it by adding emotive flanks of economic equity, Chhattisgarhi identity and even soft-Hindutva to it.

Baghel’s flagship initiatives drew heavily on regional identity – rooting for overall uplift of rural Chhattisgarh through an emphasis on conserving, developing and celebrating Narwa, Garuwa, Ghurva, Baadi (rivers, livestock, compost and homes), government purchase of cow dung from rural homes, etc. – and married them with a soft-Hindutva pitch through schemes that invoked Hindu mythology, such as the Ram Van Gaman Path, the hosting of Ramayan Mahotsav and, most recently, the launch of Bajrangbali Akhadas to promote wrestling. While Candy Crush may be his “favourite game”, Baghel is equally at ease joining Chhattisgarh locals in traditional sports such as kabaddi, gilli-danda and bhaura, among others.

Astute manoeuvres

These shrewd manoeuvres have allowed Baghel to prevent a BJP revival in the state and to also outwit his intra-party rivals, such as Singh Deo, Charandas Mahant, Tamradhwaj Sahu and Mohan Markam, while simultaneously ensuring that the Congress remains popular with the voters at large.

This is not to say that Baghel’s record as CM has been unblemished. His run-ins with Singh Deo aside, Baghel has often been accused of arbitrary decision-making and centralising power within the Chief Minister’s Office – stacked with hand-picked bureaucrats and political appointees who pledge their allegiance to him and not to the Congress.

The BJP-led Union government’s frequent use of central probe agencies to target political rivals has allowed Baghel to gloss over serious concerns over lack of probity and transparency in the functioning of his government, particularly with regard to issues of environment and forest clearances for private projects, state public service commission recruitments and the liquor sales at government vends, and brush off raids conducted by ED, CBI and the IT department against his close aides and ministers simply as “vendetta politics” by the BJP.

What could also create problems for the Congress is that its over-reliance on Baghel has virtually left its MLAs redundant in affairs of the state. This has led to a perception of Congress MLAs, including key ministers in Baghel’s cabinet, either being complacent or ineffectual.

The party has been hinting that it would bench several sitting MLAs who internal surveys done by the Congress claim could lose in the elections. However, denying tickets to sitting MLAs has always been a risky proposition for every political party, coming as it does with the possibility of such leaders sabotaging the party’s campaign.

Unrest brewing

Congress insiders say there are also two other factors that the party has tried to gloss over but which, with the right push by the BJP, could chip off its seats in the impending election.

There have been recurring instances of unrest against policies of the Baghel government in tribal dominated parts of north and south Chhattisgarh, particularly in the region around the Hasdeo-Arand forest. Singh Deo had to threaten joining cause with the agitating tribals of Ambikapur (his assembly constituency) and adjoining areas against his party’s government to force Baghel into reversing some of his policies.

A major cause of the Congress’ success in the 2018 assembly polls had been the en bloc consolidation of tribals and scheduled castes behind it. The party had bagged 25 of the state’s 29 assembly seats reserved for tribals and seven of the 10 seats reserved for SCs. If Baghel and his colleagues fail to address concerns of the tribals during the poll campaign amid the BJP’s concerted outreach to the community, it could face stiff contests in the ST seats and also the over a dozen other constituencies where the community is present in large numbers. The Congress had, earlier this year, successfully drawn to its ranks the BJP’s tallest tribal leader in the state, former MP Nand Kumar Sai, and is expected to use him extensively in the poll campaign to pacify the community.

The Congress is hoping that any loss of its tribal votes will be offset by the additional votes the party may get from the formidable backward class electorate of the state by using prominent community leaders such as Baghel (Kurmi), Tamradhwaj Sahu (Sahu) and Charandas Mahant (Das) and the promise of conducting a caste survey in the state once back in power.

The BJP, though at a disadvantage on this front due to its resistance to a caste census, has chosen to field a bulk of its candidates – 29, so far – from the backward classes; giving a fair share of seats to dominant sub-castes such as Sahus, Satnamis, Kurmis, Agharias, Ahirs and others.