The dates for the Assembly polls in the States of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram are yet to be announced but Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public rallies and meetings have already set the contours of the BJP election campaign.
In the three States of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, it has been made quite clear in words and deeds by the national leadership of the BJP that there will be no projection of a single face in the party’s campaign. The second list of candidates released by the BJP for Madhya Pradesh, fielding seven sitting MPs — three of whom are Union Ministers, makes the message clear that Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was not seen as the rallying force for the party in the State.
While addressing a rally at Chittorgarh in Rajasthan on Monday, Mr. Modi had declared, “We have only one face: the lotus.”
The BJP’s decision to not project any local leader is being attributed to the fact that in the two States of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan there are many claimants who may not pull together if one is singled out for the top post. Importantly, the national leadership is also keen that they decide who the next leader in these States would be. Reports that Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, along with several other Lok Sabha MPs from Rajasthan, will be fielded in the Assembly polls is feeding into that idea.
In the last two days, Mr. Modi has also set the line for the BJP on how to interpret the caste survey done by the Bihar government, the results of which were announced on Monday. At a public rally in Chhattisgarh on Monday, he said that the Opposition was adept at using caste to divide society. On Tuesday, again in Chattisgarh’s Jagdalpur, Mr. Modi obliquely referred to the caste survey.
“Congress says the abadi (population) of people will decide the rights (on resources), but for Modi, poor people are the biggest abadi of the country and they have the first right over resources. Welfare of the poor is my aim,” he said. He referred to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement from a few years ago, saying that minorities and Muslims would have first right over resources and asked which statement the Congress stood with. “Whose population is more?” Mr. Modi asked, and questioned whether Congress wanted to do away with the rights of minorities.
His own view of the caste survey was that “poverty is the biggest caste”, conflating class categories and marginality. This would allow the BJP to make a point bigger than caste divisions, using poverty as a common point, cutting across caste categories.
The other point he raised, in his rallies in Rajasthan on Monday, was to recall tailor Kanhaiya Lal’s gruesome murder in Udaipur last year after the latter had received threats for supporting former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma, after her comments on the Prophet caused a diplomatic controversy. This was a reminder of not only a law and order failure of the State government, but also a reference to the BJP’s plank of accusing the Congress of minority appeasement, again an issue that cuts across caste categories.
In Telangana on Tuesday, Mr. Modi stated that after the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation polls where the BJP got 48 seats, Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao had met him and asked to be included in the NDA. “I said that your karnamas (deeds) are not such that Modi will associate with you,” the Prime Minister stated in Nizamabad. The revelation was clearly meant to dispel the widely held view that the BJP had cut a deal with the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) for the latter to win the State, and set up dummy candidates in States like Maharashtra to cut into anti-BJP votes.
