The UP chief minister is the guru from whom other BJP CMs are expected to learn. The MP CM doesn’t mind.
Yogi Adityanath made a fleeting visit to Dindori district in Madhya Pradesh in April 2017, weeks after he was sworn-in as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The 44-year-old joined his MP counterpart Shivraj Singh Chouhan in the Narmada Sewa Yatra. In a brief address, Adityanath hailed Chouhan as the “best chief minister across India”, and declared that UP officials would visit MP to study his conservation initiatives for river Narmada and replicate them in the Namami Gange campaign in UP.
Chouhan was, at the time, among the BJP’s most successful chief ministers. He had held the post for nearly 12 years since being parachuted to the top seat in November 2005, replacing Babulal Gaur. He had helped the BJP decisively win two successive assembly polls in 2008 and 2013. Though groomed in the shakhas of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the BJP’s ideological fountain—and a prodigy of the party’s now-sidelined stalwart L.K. Advani, Chouhan carved a political identity for himself as chief minister. His five consecutive stints in the Lok Sabha from 1991 to 2005 had been unremarkable. Yet, as CM he had worked hard to distinguish himself as a rare ‘secular’ BJP leader who hosted iftars, visited mosques and had no aversion to wearing the Muslim skull cap. He proved to be an able administrator—launching schemes like Ladli Laxmi and Beti Bachao—and it endeared him to an electorate that hailed him as ‘Mamaji’ (maternal uncle) and voted for his party.
And so, in 2017, if Adityanath—a first-time CM—saw in Chouhan a role model for administration and image-management, it didn’t surprise anyone. Just three years later, the roles reversed. The saffron-clad head of UP’s Gorakhpur Mutt is now the guru from whom more experienced BJP CMs must learn “administration”. Chouhan, in his 15th year and fourth term as CM, courtesy the BJP’s coup d’état against Congress’s Kamal Nath last March, is no exception—an eager shishya willing to unlearn and acquire new skills.
“There are shades of Yogi’s politics and administration in what we have been seeing of Shivraj ever since he returned as CM,” says Bhopal-based political commentator Rakesh Dixit. “The genial, soft-spoken leader who tried to please all and went the extra mile to put Muslims at ease is now aggressively pursuing the RSS/BJP’s Hindutva agenda.” As examples of this makeover, Dixit points at the Shivraj government’s announcements of a law against ‘love jihad’ on the lines of a similar ordinance brought by Yogi and another proposed law against stone-throwers that will carry a life term for the accused.
The arrest of stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqui in Indore for allegedly cracking jokes about Hindu deities and Amit Shah, and the communal flare-up in Dhar, Mandsaur, Ujjain and Indore districts followed by police high-handedness against Muslim residents have been other “landmarks” of Chouhan’s new stint. Rounding up this new Shivraj model of governance is his recently announced plan for a “surveillance system” wherein working women will have to register at a police station so their movements can be tracked and his endorsement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pitch for increasing the marriageable age for women from 18 to 21 years.
The BJP, predictably, makes light of such parallels while dismissing allegations of the Chouhan government increasingly pushing a hardline agenda. State BJP chief V.D. Sharma says: “Shivrajji and Yogiji are our leaders and they both have their own style of functioning… our governments do not indulge in communal politics; we work for everyone, but we have zero tolerance for those who indulge in criminal activities like stone-pelting or trapping innocent Hindu girls and then forcing them to convert to another religion.”
Off the record, BJP leaders, particularly Chouhan confidantes, admit that the eagerness to “replicate Yogi Raj in MP is a survival tactic”. Days when a Shivraj, Raman Singh or Vasundhara Raje could be BJP CMs but refrain from hardline Hindutva politics “are long gone”, a senior BJP MLA and former minister says, adding that the BJP of Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave BJP CMs “a free hand in choosing their administrative style”, but in the Modi-Shah era, “you have to assert your Hindutva credentials and follow the template set in Delhi”. He says people may claim that Chouhan is copying Yogi, but “the fact is, Yogi too is copying Modi”.
Dixit feels the fact that Chouhan “doesn’t owe his current CM stint to an electoral win but to successful horse-trading efforts by his intra-party rivals like Narottam Mishra and Narendra Tomar has made him paranoid and unsure about his longevity in power”. He says though recent bypoll victories have placed the BJP at a comfortable majority of 126 seats in a 230-member Vidhan Sabha, “Chouhan knows that the stability of his government doesn’t guarantee him stability in office; he must appear to not simply embrace the party’s Hindutva agenda, but to champion it better than any other BJP CM, Yogi included.”
It is this supposed paranoia that the Congress believes is forcing Chouhan into regularly making statements that “do not befit someone who has been CM for three terms.” Congress MLA and former minister Jitu Patwari says: “Shivraj-ji announced that he will bury people involved in any illegal activity 10 feet deep and that nobody will be able to find them… no one should condone illegal activities, but what is the message the CM is sending with such statements? Is he above the law?”
Chouhan’s current term started on shaky ground. He became CM because Jyotiraditya Scindia delivered 23 Congress MLAs to the BJP and immediately became a threat to Chouhan’s supremacy in the state BJP. The coronavirus pandemic plunged Chouhan into a political and administrative crisis—he couldn’t form his cabinet because negotiating berths with Scindia and other BJP veterans proved tough while his government tottered in containing Covid.
The challenges for Chouhan aren’t limited to keeping Scindia at bay. “Local body elections are due in Madhya Pradesh in some months and Chouhan needs to take all factions along if he is to ensure that the BJP sweeps these polls,” says a party insider. “While Scindia poses no immediate threat, Chouhan will have to tackle (home minister) Narottam Mishra tactfully… Mishra was the key mover in the regime-change plan and his ambition to become CM is no secret; he has been made a BJP observer for Bengal polls where he will work alongside another Chouhan-rival, Kailash Vijayvargiya, and a good show for the party in Bengal may impact Chouhan negatively in MP.”
For the CM, political tests aside, tricky administrative tasks await too, points out Dixit, saying the state’s treasury is empty and “there’s a debt burden of over Rs 3 lakh crore; there’s an overdraft situation as Chouhan has been borrowing almost Rs 1,000 crore every month” to meet the state’s expenses. MP has the highest cess and duties on petrol, diesel and alcohol in the country, and these can’t be revised upwards without attracting the electorate’s wrath. The budget session will require Chouhan to do a tightrope or he risks a quick unravelling of the state’s finances, which may coincide with intra-party machinations by rivals who have been aching to ease him out of office. Can mere pretensions of being a Yogi clone alone save the day for Chouhan?