Whatever be the reason behind the unceremonious exit of Rupani, the truth is that rumblings are going on in the Gujarat BJP, writes Soroor Ahmed
If the face of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is enough to win Assembly elections in the state, why is it that the Bharatiya Janata Party has changed five chief ministers in the last six months? The number would have been six had the Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath not got the support of the top brass of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
In Gujarat the saffron party did something unprecedented when on September 11 it sent the incumbent chief minister, Vijay Rupani packing and a day later installed a first time MLA, Bhupendra Patel, as his successor. Amazingly on September 16 he inducted 24 brand new ministers in his cabinet. None of the ministers of the previous cabinet got place. Of course, a junior most legislator, elevated to the post of CM, cannot on his own dare to take such a drastic decision.
There is absolutely no denying the fact that the BJP government at the Centre had in 2021 certainly surpassed the record of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi so far as getting rid of own party chief ministers is concerned.
But if the chief ministers are just figureheads and do not matter much, why are they being repeatedly changed. The irony is that in the four of these five cases the choice of the chief minister came as a big surprise as they are political lightweights. They are Tirath Singh Rawat and Pushkar Singh Dhami of Uttarakhand, Basavaraj Bommai of Karnataka and now Bhupendra Patel, a first time MLA in Gujarat.
Not only Bhupendra himself, but all the BJP leaders, ministers in the outgoing Vijay Rupani cabinet and even MLAs were taken aback by the decision of the party’s central leadership.
It needs to be mentioned that after the last year’s Assembly election in Bihar the BJP opted to drop the then deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi and two senior ministers – Nand Kishore Yadav and Prem Kumar.
Incidentally, eight-time MLA from Gaya, Prem Kumar, who was the agriculture minister in the last cabinet of Nitish Kumar, was even in the race for the post of deputy chief minister as the BJP wanted to replace Sushil Modi. But all of a sudden came the decision of the party leadership that Prem and several others would not even be inducted into the cabinet. But then in Bihar this experiment was done after the Assembly election while Gujarat is going for poll in December 2022.
Similarly, those who were in the race for the post of chief minister in Gujarat certainly felt let down. But the news came as a big surprise to the deputy chief minister-cum-finance minister, Nitin Patel, who accepted the decision of the top leadership with tears in his eyes. This was the second time that he had missed the opportunity to become the chief minister though being a front-runner. Last time he lost to Vijay Rupani, who succeeded Anandiben Patel on August 7, 2016. On September 16 something more was in store for him as he was not even made a minister.
Though there is a general perception that the BJP suddenly replaced Rupani because of his poor performance during the second wave of corona virus yet it is also being said that the alienation of Pataidars or Patels from the Bharatiya Janata Party may have led to his exit.
However, several BJP leaders dismiss the argument that Pataidars or Patels are moving away from the saffron camp. They are of the view that this was just a propaganda spread even before the Dec 2017 Assembly election. They claim that the BJP got overwhelming percentage of Patel votes in the 2017 Assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
It needs to be mentioned that several people were killed in Gujarat when 22-year old Hardik Patel and several others led a movement for the reservation of Patels in 2015.
Uttarakhand and Gujarat – the two states where new CMs have taken charge recently – are scheduled to go for election in Feb-March and Dec next year, respectively.
But the truth is that when the Patel quota movement was launched, Anandiben Patel was the chief minister. She had actually succeeded Narendra Modi when he was elected as the prime minister of India in May 2014. The disenchantment of Patels actually began much earlier. Many academics would hold the policy of the Narendra Modi government between 2001 and 2014 responsible for the restlessness. As the
Modi government always favoured the big business-houses thousands of middle, small and micro industries owned by the Patels got closed. It is also true that a large number of Patels voted for the BJP and Pataidars living abroad are still the major donor to the saffron party.
The truth is that Rupani, who like Union home minister Amit Shah, comes from the business community of Jains, replaced Anandiben when the Patel quota movement was still going on. Now the BJP had not only brought in another Patel as the chief minister, but Pataidars got more than their due share in the new cabinet.
If tackling the second wave of Covid-19 is the reason behind his removal then there are other BJP chief ministers too who performed even more badly. Yogi Adityanath was certainly one among them. The tragedy is that the Yogi government went on with the four-phase Panchayat poll in the second half of April when corona virus was at its peak.
The BJP top brass wanted Yogi to be removed, but he refused to buckle under pressure. Instead he mustered support of the Sangh Parivar and thus managed to survive.
Analysts are of the view that Rupani had to go because he was the chief minister of the home state of PM and the Union home minister. So he never managed to get a free hand in running the state. His daughter Radhika Rupani, who lives abroad, complained in a social media post that her father had to go because of his soft behaviour and kind-hearted approach. She was perhaps referring to Yogi, who could not be removed as he resisted any such move of the central leadership.
Anyway there is no dearth of people in Gujarat who are of the view that blaming Rupani alone for the failure in dealing with the pandemic would not entirely be correct. In fact the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad was the venue of two Test and five Twenty20 matches with England between February 24 and March 20 when coronavirus was wreaking havoc in Gujarat and several parts of the country.
It was none else but President Ramnath Kovind who on February 24, 2021 inaugurated the world’s largest Narendra Modi Stadium which has a capacity of 1.32 lakh.
Here it needs to be mentioned that Rupani had collapsed while delivering a speech in Ahmedabad on February 14, 2021. It was later detected that he was suffering from Covid-19. In spite of that the stadium was inaugurated in Ahmedabad 10 days later. Among those present on the occasion was Amit Shah too.
Whatever be the reason behind the unceremonious exit of Rupani, the truth is that rumblings are going on in the Gujarat BJP. The new chief minister had to put off the oath-taking ceremony from September 15 to September 16. Further delay was not possible as September 17 was Prime Minister Modi’s birthday.
Apparently, the BJP may be putting up a brave front but the truth is that there is uneasiness within. The rank and file may not be speaking out anything against the Modi-Shah duo for obvious reasons, but the challenge ahead is not easy. In the last Assembly poll the tally of the party fell from 116 to 99 in the House of 182.
If the Congress managed to put a better show, it may not be surprising that the saffron party may have to face a stiff challenge. But much depends upon the performance of the party in the UP election due in Feb-March 2022.
The BJP is hopeful that with a new team in Gujarat it would do better. It needs to be mentioned that after the rout of the party in Chhattisgarh in December 2018 Assembly election the BJP had decided to deny tickets to all its ten MPs for the Lok Sabha election in April-May 2018. The strategy worked and the party swept the poll in the state.