Three factors in Modi-era that got Mohan Yadav the chief ministerial chair

Third term Ujjain Dakshin legislator Mohan Yadav, who was sworn-in as MP chief minister, on Wednesday (December 13), trumping other probables, including the state’s and BJP’s longest serving CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan, former Union ministers Prahlad Patel and Narendra Singh among several other seasoned party leaders, ticks each of these boxes.

PM's largesse

Per commentators and BJP insiders, what possibly dictated the BJP central leadership’s choice of Yadav were his credentials as a loyal ‘organisation man’, who worked his way up the political ladder from a shakha of the RSS and the rough and tumble of students’ politics to the CM’s chair; his backward caste identity and the fact, that like most other incumbent BJP CMs, he owes his current station not to any mass appeal among voters but to the generous largesse of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Like his newly-chosen counterparts Vishnu Deo Sai and Bhajan Lal Sharma in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan or other BJP CMs such as Haryana’s ML Khattar, Gujarat’s Bhupendra Patel, Uttarakhand’s Pushkar Dhami or Goa’s Pramod Sawant, respectively, the 58-year-old Yadav represents the generational shift that Modi has been steering his party towards in recent years. On this count, the choice of Yadav is pragmatic for it gives the BJP a leader who can continue to push the saffron gauntlet further while the Congress struggles to replace a jaded leadership with fresh blood.

Yadav, whose name was not even in the long list of probables for the job that was being hotly debated in the run up to the BJP legislative party endorsing his candidature, cannot boast of any mass following yet nor of being an administrative titan. He may have been elected as MLA for a third consecutive term from a known BJP bastion but his experience in government is limited to the past three years when he was inducted as higher education minister in Chouhan’s cabinet.

As such, Yadav’s gratitude and loyalty towards Modi, the man who has the final word on picking BJP CMs, can be counted upon and the Prime Minister needn’t worry, just yet, of the Ujjain legislator developing a mind and clout of his own, like Vasundhara Raje, BS Yediyurappa or even Shivraj Chouhan.

Hardline Hindutva proponent

For Madhya Pradesh though, it is Yadav’s ease with the third aspect of the leitmotif – that of a hardline Hindutva proponent with a known record of making incendiary speeches, endorsing a muscular state and launching into a vituperative diatribe against both, political rivals and religious minorities – that brings ominous tidings.

It is not surprising that moments after he was chosen as leader of the BJP’s legislative party, while journalists were busy searching the internet for his credentials, at least two recent videos of Yadav went viral on social media.

The first video was from a public meeting at Ujjain’s Tower Chowk during his recent election campaign in which was alleging that his political rivals want to create obstacles in the development of Ujjain. “Will you create hurdles in the development of Ujjain? Kya tumhe tumhare baap ne doodh pilaya hai... kya aukaat hai tumhari (have you been breastfed by your fathers; what is your status),” Yadav can be heard saying while declaring that his political rivals “will be buried where they have come from”.

Soon after, a second video, also purportedly shot during the election campaign, made it to social media platforms in which Yadav and his supporters can be seen pushing local Congress workers and venting out a string of vile abuses.

Strong-arm politician

Journalists in MP, particularly those from Indore and Ujjain, say such violent outbursts by Yadav are not new.

“In Ujjain, everyone knows him as Mohan pehalwan (wrestler) but this is not simply for his interested in wrestling (Yadav is also the MP wrestling association chief) but because he has a reputation of a strong-arm politician; his supporters in Ujjain often rough up rivals and threaten them with all kinds of consequences... his early days were spent in students’ politics, where violence, aggression and intimidation is condoned and since he also comes from a staunch RSS background, his strong anti-Muslim mindset comes with that grounding,” an Ujjain-based journalist with a local Hindi paper who did not wish to be identified told The Federal.

Bhopal-based political commentator Girija Shankar agreed with this assessment of Yadav but said, “as an ordinary MLA or party member, he may have been prone to aggressive and abusive outbursts against his rivals but as CM, he will obviously be more careful... I would not want to pre-empt how he will act as CM but I do hope he will not continue in the same confrontational style that he was known for when he was an MLA or even a minister.”

Pedalling of rabid Hindutva

Shankar, however, believes that Yadav’s aggression and pedalling of rabid Hindutva could have been a factor that aided the BJP’s central leadership in picking him as the “dark horse in the CM race”.

“Over the past five years, all BJP CMs have followed this very template. Even Shivraj, who was hailed even by MP’s Muslims as a moderate BJP leader during his earlier terms as CM, was a very different man during his final stint in office.... many said Shivraj was copying Yogi Adityanath when he began advocating bulldozer justice and starting using phrases like zameen mei dafna dunga (will bury you in the ground) in his public speeches but the fact is that he was merely trying to mould himself into a frame that he thought would earn him favour with Modi and secure him another term as CM; if Yadav now follows the same template, I would say he is merely following the path BJP CMs think they need to follow to protect their chair and to earn Modi’s favour,” Shankar explained.

Many believe that the BJP’s surprise landslide victory in the recent assembly polls despite palpable anti-incumbency and fatigue against over 18 years of saffron rule was because acceptance for Hindutva had taken deep roots in the psyche of the state’s electorate. The Congress’s desperate attempts, under Kamal Nath’s stewardship, to appear ‘more Hindu than the BJP’, evidently won the party no incremental gains as the voters unequivocally chose the original over the shoddy duplicate.

Bhopal-based veteran journalist Rakesh Dixit believes the scale of the BJP’s mandate in MP will only embolden Yadav to be more acerbic against his political rivals as well as against the state’s Muslim minority, though he may “couch it better to avoid negative publicity so early in his tenure”.

First steps as CM

Yadav’s swearing-in ceremony and his government’s first decision after assuming office were, perhaps, instructive of what is to follow in the state.

A bevy of Hindu priests, several of them drawn from Ujjain’s Mahakaal Temple, were called in for Yadav’s oath-taking ceremony in Bhopal and were seated prominently next to the main dais. Union home minister Amit Shah, BJP national president JP Nadda and BJP chief ministers of other states who were all present for the ceremony made it a point to pay their obeisance to the priests before the swearing-in took place.

Soon after, Yadav left Bhopal for Ujjain to take blessings of Mahakaal for his new innings.

By Wednesday evening, the new CM was back in the state capital to preside over the first meeting of his cabinet following which orders were issued banning use of loud speakers at “all religious places” to curb noise pollution.

“Though the ban applies to all religious places, it remains to be seen whether it would be imposed as impartially as it has been stipulated or if it is used to selectively target mosques which use loudspeakers to give the call for prayer. We will know soon enough how this is being implemented and what we find may tell us which way Yadav wants to steer the state to,” said Dixit.