Who will be the face of the BJP in Chhattisgarh has been a question that has kept everyone guessing for a while.
During Friday’s party workers’ convention — the first major event by the State unit since changing State unit president and Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly — the party’s Chhattisgarh in charge D. Purandeswari brought up the issue, only to provide a vague answer.
“People ask me who our [chief ministerial] face will be and I say that every party worker who is sitting on the dias, is a leader for us,” she said, while addressing party workers. She said this at a time when almost all major party leaders in the organisational hierarchy and various MPs and MLAs were present at the stage, waiting for the party’s national president J.P. Nadda, the key attraction of the convention, to arrive.
The party had in August appointed Arun Sao, who hails from the influential Sahu caste, as the new State president. His appointment and that of Narayan Chandel as the Leader of the Opposition, which followed days later, had earlier been dubbed by BJP sources as a sign of the national leadership’s inclination to have a better control over the party’s State-level affairs.
Some had also described it as a move to sideline three-time Chief Minister Raman Singh, under whom the BJP tasted a humiliating defeat in 2018. A notable in BJP’s public outreach of late has been “Raman Sarkar”, a far cry from the time when Dr. Singh was seen as almost synonymous with the ruling party in Chhattisgarh. Most speakers at the convention also refrained from discussing Dr. Singh’s chief ministerial days during the convention, referring to past stints as BJP government.
However, there was little to suggest if Mr. Sao was firmly in the driver’s seat as both Mr. Singh and he evenly shared the limelight. Both accompanied Mr. Nadda to the stage and both made welcome addresses for the party’s national president. During their turns, they attacked Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel as having failed to live up to electoral promises.
For her part, Ms. Purandeswari also flipped the leadership question and asked if Congress was sure who would lead it into the next elections. “Will it be T.S. Singh Deo or Tamradhwaj Sahu (both senior Ministers in the Bhupesh Baghel government)?,” she asked, after claiming that Mr. Baghel had assured voters in the two leaders’ respective areas that he would share power with them.
Some gaffes
During the convention at the Science College here, BJP national president J.P. Nadda claimed that, recently, 71 tribals had died in Chhattisgarh and instead of addressing the issue, the Chief Minister was busy “clapping with Rahul Gandhi- ji in Kerala”. However, no such incident of mass violence or killings in such numbers has been reported since Mr. Baghel assumed power in 2018.
Similarly, Mr. Nadda addressed Mungeli MLA Punnulal Mohale as the former Leader of Opposition, a position Mr. Mohale has never held in the State Assembly or the Parliament. Referring to an incomplete and abandoned skywalk project in Raipur, which was conceived and started during Dr. Singh’s tenure, Mr. Nadda said that the present Congress government was denying people the opportunity to use a skywalk. However, the project has been controversial since the beginning, with many residents questioning its utility.
