How BJP scripted history to wrest back state from Baghel’s Congress
Despite the lack of a clear state leader, the BJP's focus on welfare and anti-corruption, along with PM Modi as the face, led to its unprecedented victory in Chhattisgarh, winning 54 seats. The party strategically announced candidates for weaker seats in advance and fielded senior leaders. They also targeted local issues and highlighted corruption allegations against the Congress. The BJP's shift in announcing welfare schemes in its manifesto also resonated with voters. Overall, the Congress was unable to offer anything substantial beyond welfare schemes.
For four and a half years after a resounding loss in December 2018, on the surface at the very least, the Chhattisgarh BJP seemed leaderless and rudderless. Their tallest leader, three term Chief Minister Raman Singh, was diminished the party falling to a record 15 seat low, and with no clear second rung, there seemed to be a vacuum. The party tried tribal leader Vishnu Dev Sai, but in 2022, with the Congress focusing on OBC’s, made one time MP Arun Sao party president, diligent but without the heft to carry a campaign. But despite the lack of a clear state leader to rally around, with Prime Minister Modi as the face, a turn towards welfare and a sharp focus on the Congress corruption, the BJP has pulled off the most unprecedented of results in its sweep of the Hindi heartland, winning 54 of the 90 seats in its best ever Chhattisgarh performance.
Senior BJP leaders said that while they used “collective leadership”, fundamentally coalescing around Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the face, they were calculated about other key decisions. One of them, leaders said, was the decision to announce candidates for 21 seats, all that the party considered relatively weak on August 17, nearly three months before the polls were officially announced.
The other decision was to field senior leaders including four members of parliament, such as Renuka Singh and Arun Sao, both of whom won.
This strategy tied in with the local anti-incumbency against Congress legislators, with the Congress seemingly acknowledging this in their removal of 22 sitting MLA’s. “The disenchantment against legislators came to the fore and the party’s miscalculations will haunt it. The party initially went to the elections on the face of Baghel but by the end said collective leadership. On the other hand, the BJP, even without a leadership, was clear in its messaging,” a senior Congress leader said.
In the last leg of the campaign, the BJP pressed the Congress, and chief minister Baghel, on allegations of corruption, ranging irregularities in coal, Mahadev app(an online betting scam), excise and in the use of the District Mineral Fund. “The people of the state understood that the Congress was looting the state government and hence overthrew them,” said Ajay Chandrakar, former minister and senior leader who won the election from the Kurud constituency.
In Bastar and Surguja, the party ran targeted campaigns on local issues. In the north of the state, the party quietly took advantage of internal Congress issues like TS Singhdeo not being made Chief Minister. In Bastar, they used festering anger against conversions- tribals expressing concerns that their communities were allegedly being proselytized by Christian missionaries. “In most seats in Bastar, this conversion politics seeped in,” a Congress leader said.
Importantly, on November 3, when it announced its manifesto, the BJP also made a concerted shift from a long standing position. In 2018, the BJP had been voted out after failing to fulfill a promise of a paddy bonus, ostensibly being actively discouraged by the central government. In 2023 however, faced with a slew of Congress promises, the BJP announced welfare schemes of its own, and called them “Modi’s guarantees.” “This was a first for the BJP in Chhattisgarh and people expressed their support for the Prime Minister. The promise of purchasing paddy at ₹3,100 per quintal, giving ₹12,000 to every woman in the state are among those that worked for the party. This complemented other aspects of its campaign. The Congress, on the other hand, had nothing to offer other than welfare schemes,” said Harsh Dubey, a Chhattisgarh based political commentator.