THE RUMBLINGS WITHIN
On May 8, the BJP top brass, including party chief J.P. Nadda, Union home minister Amit Shah and general secretary (organisation) B.L. Santhosh, went into a huddle with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They had to decide on the party’s pick to lead the Assam government—incumbent chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal or his challenger Himanta Biswa Sarma. Sarma’s political acumen, his hold over Assam’s politics and his contributions in helping the BJP spread its wings in the Northeast were in no doubt, but then Sonowal was equally popular in the state.
The dilemma was justifying the change in leadership just after retaining power in the assembly poll. The central leadership decided to bite the bullet and go with challenger Sarma; Sonowal will reportedly be “adjusted” in the Union cabinet soon. To be fair, the BJP had not projected either as CM candidate, yet it was assumed the incumbent would continue in office. Two months before this, the central leadership had replaced Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat with the low-profile Tirath Singh Rawat after state legislators rebelled against the former CM. In November 2020, the party pulled Bihar deputy CM Sushil Modi to the Centre after he had successfully led the party in the assembly poll in alliance with Nitish Kumar’s JD(U). These are just some of the glaring examples of the BJP not hesitating to shake up things in the states it rules if it does not fit the central leadership’s scheme of things.
Meanwhile, the party is grooming leaders grown from the ranks loyal to the central Modi-Shah duo. The current lot of chief ministers in BJP-ruled states fall under one of three categories—state satraps such as B.S. Yediyurappa (Karnataka) and Shivraj Singh Chouhan (MP); incidental appointments after the party came to power like M.L. Khattar (Haryana), Yogi Adityanath (UP) and Jairam Thakur (Himachal Pradesh); and young turks like Sarma who have earned their party stripes.
The bigger challenge for the party is working out a succession plan for the veterans. The delay and lack of clarity on this is already creating challenges in Karnataka and MP. Whereas in states where the party came to power riding the Modi wave, there are new claimants for the top job. The BJP has already paid a price for not changing the leadership in Jharkhand and Haryana despite the negative feedback before the assembly polls in
