MP: How BJP looks to gain from Suresh Pachouri’s switch, besides the optics

Weeks before the Lok Sabha polls, the Congress’s crisis of attrition escalated in Madhya Pradesh on Saturday (March 9), with former Union minister Suresh Pachouri, several former Congress MLAs, and office bearers joining the BJP in Bhopal.

The exodus comes within days of Rahul Gandhi’s ongoing Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra exiting Madhya Pradesh, at a time when the party is busy finalising candidates for the upcoming polls, making the desertion more damaging for the Congress, which has to face the BJP in a bipolar contest in 28 of the state’s 29 seats. Understandably then, the BJP has gone all out to milk this latest round of inductions as a big vote of no-confidence by dejected Congress leaders — old-timers and whippersnappers alike — against the party’s central leadership, particularly the Gandhis.

What about electoral gain?

The paeans that Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, his predecessor Shivraj Singh Chouhan, state BJP chief VD Sharma, and state Cabinet minister Kailash Vijayvargiya sang in Pachouri’s praise — with Sharma even likening the former four-term Rajya Sabha MP to a “saint” — while welcoming him into the party are par for the course in this season of party-hopping by politicians of all hues.

Yet, what should beckon dispassionate appraisal is the electoral gain, if any, that an already ascendant BJP, with a vote-clinching mascot like Narendra Modi, stands to make by throwing open its doors to Congress leaders such as the 71-year-old Pachouri, who, in a nearly five-decade-long political innings, has never won a direct election to the Lok Sabha or state Assembly.

Prominent catch in terms of optics

There is little doubt that Pachouri, as a frontline Congress leader in MP for years, with two stints as junior minister in the Union Cabinet to boast, is a prominent catch for the BJP in terms of optics. The Brahmin leader, who started his public career from student politics and went on to serve the Congress in multiple capacities — head of MP’s Youth Congress unit, chief of the Congress Seva Dal, president of MP Congress, 24 years as a Rajya Sabha MP starting back in 1984, and junior minister in the Narasimha Rao and UPA-I regimes — has been a party insider who journalists in Delhi and Bhopal often thronged to for “exclusive insights” into the functioning of the party and its governments.

In the past four decades, since he was picked by the late Rajiv Gandhi for a Rajya Sabha debut in 1984 despite reservations expressed by then MP chief minister and late Congress stalwart Arjun Singh, Pachouri had switched effortlessly from being a confidante of Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri to Sonia Gandhi’s rival aides of the late 1990s — first, Vincent George and, finally, Ahmed Patel. That he achieved all of this despite having not a single electoral victory to his credit is as much a commentary on Pachouri’s commendable political guile and dexterity as it is on the Congress high command’s suicidal proclivity for sycophancy that invariably substitutes drawing room political machinations with grassroots mobilisation.

Not a mass leader

The long years that Pachouri spent in key party and government positions helped him build a clique of his own in MP’s heavily factionalised Congress unit and carve his own space against taller and electorally more influential leaders such as Arjun Singh, Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath, and the late Subhash Yadav and Jamuna Devi. Despite this enviable personal accomplishment, however, Pachouri never managed to turn himself from a party manager into a mass leader with a constituency he could call his own.

It is this failure that eventually led to Pachouri falling out of favour with the Congress high command. For, when the chips began to fall for the Congress in MP following the 2003 poll rout under Digvijaya Singh, and the high command dispatched Pachouri to the state as party chief upon the completion of his fourth Rajya Sabha term in 2008, he failed miserably and the party lost the polls again, the first one the BJP was contesting in MP under Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s leadership. In subsequent years, Pachouri failed to be renominated to the Rajya Sabha and his attempts to prove himself electorally by contesting the Assembly polls from Bhojpur, his native town near Bhopal, failed in quick succession both in 2013 and 2018. Pachouri had previously contested only one other election — the 1999 Lok Sabha polls from Bhopal against firebrand BJP leader Uma Bharti — and lost by a margin of nearly 1.70 lakh votes.

How Pachouri carved his niche

What Pachouri failed to achieve in his personal quest for electoral heft, he, however, succeeded in wresting by proxy. Congress leaders from MP are full of tales about how Pachouri, due to his proximity to Ahmed Patel, which, by extension, built him up as a kitchen cabinet member of the Congress high command, succeeded in establishing a vice-like grip over the local party organisation in Bhopal and adjoining districts of Sehore, Raisen, and Hoshangabad.

“Even Digvijaya Singh and Kamal Nath could not curtail Pachouri’s influence in appointing office bearers across the local party unit in Bhopal, Sehore, Raisen, and Hoshangabad. He had the maximum say in distributing tickets for local body, Assembly, and Lok Sabha polls in these districts and even now, a majority of office bearers in these districts are people handpicked by him,” a senior MP Congress leader, who has known Pachouri since the 1970s, told The Federal.

What BJP hopes to gain from

This clout that Pachouri exercised in the MP Congress, sources say, is what the BJP now hopes to gain from, as the former Gandhi family loyalist, who on Saturday accused the Congress of straying from its ideology of building a “class-less society” and “insulting Lord Ram and our military forces”, begins his saffron waltz.

It is not surprising that the slew of leaders who joined the BJP along with Pachouri on Saturday included his close associates — former Indore 1 MLA Sanjay Shukla, who was defeated in the last Assembly polls by Kailash Vijayvargiya, former Sohagpur MLA Satpal Paliya, former Bhopal district Congress chief Kailash Mishra, and former Bhopal Cooperative Bank chairman Subhash Shukla. Sources said a litany of other Congress leaders who Pachouri had accommodated in the party over the years are likely to switch to the BJP soon. Former Dhar MP Gajendra Singh Rajukhedi and former MLAs Vishal Patel and Arjun Palia, too, switched to the BJP. Of these, Sanjay Shukla and Rajukhedi are both leaders with significant political influence in their respective constituencies.

To be fielded from Hoshangabad?

Speculation is now rife that Pachouri may be fielded by the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls from Hoshangabad, a saffron bastion that has been won by the Congress only once since 1989, when Uday Pratap Singh, a Pachouri aide, bagged the seat in 2009. Incidentally, Uday Pratap had quit the Congress to join the BJP ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and had been re-elected from the constituency that year and again in 2019. Uday Pratap was one of the seven sitting Lok Sabha MPs the BJP had fielded in last year’s MP Assembly polls and is currently a minister in the state.

Sources said the BJP was looking for Uday Pratap’s replacement from the Hoshangabad constituency and its search may have ended with Pachouri, who may be hoping that Modi’s continuing popularity and the Hindutva wave in MP may finally pave the way for his electoral victory if he is indeed given a ticket. The joke among Congress leaders in MP, however, is that Pachouri’s candidature from Hoshangabad could just as well help the Congress win the seat, given the septuagenarian leader’s poor track record in direct elections.