Does BJP lack leaders in poll states of Haryana, Maharshtra and Jharkhand?

Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha recently, uncharacteristically, used the C-word while talking about BJP’s chief ministerial candidate in Jharkhand. When the C-expletive defines chief ministerial material, it only underscores the party’s attitude towards regional satraps.
There is a distinct erosion of the stature of the Sangh Parivar’s political satrap after the new leadership has taken over the reins of BJP and the Union government. Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand polls are just around the corner. But the party does not have tall leaders in these states who could be safely assumed to lead the campaign & later the govt.

A cadre-based party like BJP has always thrived on creating new leaders, often representing hitherto unrepresented social groups. Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Kalyan Singh, Gopinath Munde, Shankarsinh Vaghela, Yeddyurappa and their ilk had given the Sangh Parivar a rare crop of political leaders who struck firm roots in their respective socio-linguistic constituencies building the party from down below. Unlike most other political outfits, BJP leadership was always generous in rewarding the hardworking state-level Parivar workers. This grand tradition of a party getting organically built up by the cadre and the leaders emerging from this very cadre base seems to have taken a beating. The very process that ensured primacy of Narendra Modi in Gujarat, Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan and Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh is getting undermined in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

Instead, BJP seems to be taking a leaf out of Indira Gandhi’s book of managing dissent, curtailing leadership and reducing the regional leaders to Delhi’s puppets. When many big leaders shifted to the enemy camp first within and later outside the party, Indira had to make do with smaller players who were turned into chief ministers and Pradesh Congress Committee chiefs. Most of them owed their rise to power to the Prime Minister and not to a disciplined cadre or their own political agenda.

So, all they needed to do to survive at the top of the state units and governments was to participate in palace intrigues and the politics of sycophancy. Indira was the vote-catcher who ensured power for the party. Even splits caused by regional satraps did not matter, so long as she insured the party against electoral losses. The tradition continued with Rajiv Gandhi famously making and unmaking leaders, at times sacking satraps on a whim.

The new BJP, perhaps, considers Modi to be Indira Gandhi II, the sole engine of the organisation that pulls it up to its electoral victories. If only Modi matters and if elections are going to be won by the prime minister with his oratorical skills and the Gujarat model promises, then surely satraps have no place in the scheme of things.

But the attempt to replicate the Gandhi family model may not work in the Sangh Parivar because unlike Congress, BJP is not an organisation complete in itself. Like Modi, all the important leaders of the party have come from RSS and without the mother ship, BJP’s electoral boats won’t reach anywhere. So, however much the party may try to centralise its powers within the PM-party president duo, RSS always holds the keys to the organisation.

If the party is reduced to just one person and his charisma, RSS may even be forced to step in to ensure the tradition of a strong cadre producing good leaders in every state, who in turn come to the Centre to implement the RSS agenda.

Even Sonia Gandhi had realised long ago that if politics is reduced to just the Delhi durbar, only sycophants emerge as leaders. And this could be one reason why she ensured stability for all her satraps.