A strong central government does not necessarily mean frequent change of government in the states – be it of the opposition or of the own party.
The removal of B S Yediyurappa from the post of Karnataka chief minister on July 26 and subsequent ‘election’ of Basavaraj Bommai as his successor a day later – the fourth such change made by the Bharatiya Janata Party in just over four and a half months – expose the confusion, chaos and uncertainty within the saffron party’s strategy.
Earlier, the party replaced chief ministers twice in Uttarakhand on March 10 and July 2-3 and Assam on May 10. In June it appeared that the Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath would also be asked to go following his failure to tackle the second wave of corona virus, but the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the BJP, finally bailed him out on the plea that it would not be prudent to replace a firebrand future prospect like him on the eve of Assembly election.
Though the BJP alone or along with the allies, is in power in half of the 28 states – several of them small ones of North-East, Goa and Puducherry – yet it is a fact that in the heartland of India a few states have slipped out of its hand in the past couple of years. The BJP-led NDA had lost Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Punjab, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, etc. in the recent past, though it managed to get back to power by different means in the last two of them.
In some of them the party lost because it made unusual experiments. The leadership thought that Moditva would prevail over the caste or other social factors. So it installed a non-tribal, Raghubar Das as the chief minister of Jharkhand after Assembly election held in December 2014. This was notwithstanding the fact that the state came into existence on November 15, 2000 after a prolong struggle by Adivasis. Barring North-East there is little scope for a tribal to become chief minister anywhere except Jharkhand. The saffron party even deprived them of this opportunity.
Two months before the Jharkhand poll of 2014 it put up a non-Maratha (in fact a Brahmin), Devendra Fadnavis as the CM of Maharashtra and at the same time a non-Jat Punjabi Manohar Lal Khattar as the chief minister of Haryana.
By 2019 the Modi magic got waned in the state Assembly polls and it was only in Haryana election of October that year that the party just managed to return to power and that too with the help of Jannayak Janata Party, a Jat outfit.
The saffron party did so notwithstanding the fact that in 2014 Assembly as well as Lok Sabha polls held earlier the same year the Adivasis, Marathas and Jats largely voted for the BJP.
As if this much experiment was not enough, the saffron party, instead of letting the Congress or its allies rule the states, engineered a somewhat bizarre split. Though it led to the return to power of B S Yediyurappa and Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh respectively, what the party central leadership did not realise is that both the chief ministers had to do a lot of balancing acts to survive. The endless tussle between the old guards of the BJP and turncoats from Congress and in the case of Karnataka Janata Dal (Secular), became a constant tension for them. This had a detrimental impact on the governance especially when the country was passing through an unprecedented health crisis.
But the party central leadership did not stop there. It is still trying its level best to cause split in Rajasthan by wooing Sachin Pilot though the former BJP chief minister Vasundhara Raje is opposed to the very idea as she knows that the former would cross over on the condition of getting the CM post. Pilot was already the deputy chief minister till last year July when CM Ashok Gehlot removed him for his alleged hobnobbing with the BJP. Raje would not let any such change take place as she would be the ultimate loser.
So not only the opposition ruled states, even the one ruled by the BJP and its allies are facing social and political upheaval. This destabilisation is costing the BJP dearly. The saffron party chief ministers are finding their hands tied and are just expected to dance to the tune of the Centre.
The new Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, though in Congress till August 2015, and Shivraj Singh Chauhan during his second innings since March 23, 2020, have adopted a much stronger pro-Hindutva line than in the past. This is simply because they think that they can survive only by keeping the central leadership in good humour.
In contrast Yediyurappa adopted a somewhat soft approach towards Muslims even during the smear campaign against the Tablighi Jamaat at the height of first wave of Covid-19. He tried to check the virus of communalism which his detractors within the party were trying to spread.
He comes from the politically powerful Lingayat caste which forms about 17-18 per cent of Karnataka’s population. They are especially concentrated in the northern part of the state.
Veerashaivism or Lingayatism was founded in the 12th century by religious reformer Basava, who preached monotheism and opposed idol worship. A few years back some Lingayats even demanded that their sect be treated as a separate religion. The then Congress government of Siddaramaiah even supported it in 2018 – though the then CM himself was not from this caste.
The BJP which came to power in Karnataka only because of the support from Lingayats is now not adopting the policy of ignoring the dominant caste as it did in Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, etc. So even after getting rid of Yediyurappa it made another Lingayat as the chief minister.
Basavaraj Bommai, unlike many other BJP chief ministers, has no RSS background. Instead, his father S R Bommai was the chief minister of Janata Party between 1988 and 1989. He served as the president of the then Janata Dal for six years in 1990s and was also the Union minister during the United Front government of Deve Gowda and I K Gujral.
Basavaraj himself was in the Janata Dal-United till 2008, the year the first BJP government under Yediyurappa came to power in Karnataka. Till Basavaraj became the chief minister he was the home minister and is known for a somewhat liberal approach in the state where the BJP is a divided house between the hardliners and softliners.
Now much depends on as to how much influence his predecessor would be able to have on him. Or will the pro-Hindutva like Tejaswi Surya, a young MP from the Brahmin caste, prevails.