- Wednesday, May 07, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
PRIME minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) registered a massive electoral victory on December 3 when it clinched three key states in the Hindi heartland — an achievement that would boost its confidence ahead of next year’s general elections.
After the results were out, the BJP went into a huddle to pick its chief ministers for the three states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Although all three have experienced leaders that the party could pick as the CM — Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan, Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh and Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh — it decided to move ahead of them and select fresh faces.
In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP picked Mohan Yadav, a lesser-known leader, at the expense of Chouhan, who has been the party’s longest serving chief minister of the central state with an experience of 16 years in the office. The 58-year-old Yadav, who has been the state’s highest education minister, belongs to the Yadav Other Backward Classes community that makes up more than half of Madhya Pradesh’s population. The Yadav community, however, is not among the most influential.
The BJP is known for picking chief ministerial faces ahead of state elections but exceptions have been noticed for the past few polls and one would consider it a well-crafted move before the big battle of 2024.
The decision of not going with experienced faces such as Chouhan is a one to kill anti-incumbency. At the same time, the fact that Yadav was nominated by his immediate predecessor and the idea being backed by other senior leaders of the BJP in the state shows that there is considerable unity in the party’s ranks when it comes to promoting a new face at the helm.
The BJP also picked two deputy chief ministers in Jagdish Devda and Rajesh Shukla, both of whom had held cabinet berths in the previous Chouhan governments. Narendra Singh Tomar, one of three former cabinet members to contest the election, is the speaker of the Madhya Pradesh assembly.
Chouhan, who might have run his course in the state’s political circles with this change, ensured that the transfer of power to Yadav was amicable and hailed the latter as a hard-working person.
The BJP has remained too dependent on the Narendra Modi factor but sometimes, it fails to deliver for the party the desired results because of less-than convincing local leadership. The party thus has focused on a collective leadership built around Modi and backed by state leaders and government welfare measures in the local polls.
The strategy has paid off. While Modi conducted tireless campaigns in the state (along with the others that went to polls in November), Chouhan’s welfare schemes, including the pro-girl one, played together a crucial role in decimating the opposition Indian National Congress.
The Congress has also tasted success in states such as Karnataka earlier this year by choosing not to name a CM candidate. The BJP also followed the same and the strategy paid off in the three Hindi heartland states this time.
The strategy-makers in the BJP came up with a smart move to fox the opposition by changing its long-serving face in the state despite the fact that the face was doing well. Madhya Pradesh, for instance, did well in various socio-economic parameters but yet a lot has to be done and the BJP nullified the opposition’s attack with a pre-emptive strike by picking a new chief minister. This would give them a breathing space at least till the next general elections and force the opposition to chart out a new strategy to counter them.
