BJP is afraid of a revolt if they announce Sushil Modi as Bihar CM candidate

All those pretenders and other claimants to being the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate for the throne of Bihar, move over. Move over Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former and very brief Bihar chief minister and the leader of the Mahadalit Musahar community – sitting in pride of place, on the right of BJP president Amit Shah at the press conference on Monday afternoon.

Ambitions

Move over Ram Vilas Paswan, cabinet minister for consumer affairs, food and public distribution, eight-time member of Parliament from Bihar and the tallest leader of the Dalit Paswan community -sitting on Amit Shah’s left at the presser.

Drop your ambitions, communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Stifle your dreams, minister for skill development Rajiv Pratap Rudy. As for agriculture minister and four-time MP from Purvi Champaran Radha Mohan Singh, it may be time to refocus on the drought and rising farm suicides in the rest of the country, instead of poll tactics in Bihar.

None of the Thakurs have a chance at the throne, including CP Thakur, a Bhumihar leader from Muzaffarpur. Upendra Kushwaha of the RLSP seems pacified with 23 seats. As for Giriraj Singh, the Nawada MP prone to both communal and sexist gaffes, he had smartly edged himself into the photo-opportunity by sitting strategically behind Amit Shah at the same press conference.

The fact is, there is only one chosen one, only one real claimant to the BJP’s candidacy for chief ministership in the big battle for Bihar and that is the mild-mannered and former deputy chief minister Sushil Modi, a lifelong member of the RSS who also maintains strong lines with Delhi’s BJP leadership. Unfortunately, his caste doesn’t quite cut it. In a state where kinship and lineage are significant determinants of your success in politics, Sushil Modi’s Bania caste makes him a bit of an outlier.Neither an upper caste Brahmin or Thakur or Rajput or Bhumihar – all the castes who have a stake in perpetuating the status quo – nor part of the alphabet soup of aspirational backward caste categories, whether OBC or MBC or EBC, and definitely not a member of either the Dalits or the Mahadalits, Modi has hung in the BJP’s frontlines by dint of his hard work. So why isn’t the BJP announcing his name? Amit Shah dodged the question at the press conference, insisting only that the election will be fought in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. All in good time, said Shah, once we win, the elected MLAs will choose their leader.

Revolt

The truth is that the BJP is keenly aware that if they announce Modi’s name as its chief ministerial candidate today, they will have a mini-revolt on their hands, from all the aforementioned leaders of Bihar and others.

Each one of these fancies himself as the next occupant of 1, Anne Marg in Patna, traditionally the chief minister’s residence. Worse, Bihar’s caste-obsessed polity may tend to vote differently if confronted with Sushil Modi’s candidature.

So much better, as a senior BJP politician put it, to follow the “umbrella school” of politics. So much safer to go with the PM as the party’s face in Bihar, especially after the debacle in the Delhi elections earlier this year. The announcement of Kiran Bedi as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate cost the party dearly – it allowed AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal and the press to train their guns on her, forcing her to commit one mistake after another. Several crores worth of advertisements in the last days of the election campaign with Narendra Modi’s face in the centre of those ads couldn’t make up for the big blunder.

Can Bihar be another Delhi? Perish the thought, Amit Shah would exclaim, although it’s astonishing why he was so abrasive with his answers to the media.The fact remains that the Nitish Kumar-Lalu Yadav-Sonia Gandhi grand alliance is giving the NDA coalition a run for its money – although it won 31 seats out of 40 in the Lok Sabha election in Bihar barely 15 months ago.

Alliance

For a start, the grand alliance of the self-avowed secular parties has a clear candidate – Nitish Kumar. None other than Lalu Yadav has accepted him and asked all his caste brothers (and sisters, I dare say) to vote for him. But Nitish is primarily hoping to showcase his own “development” card, which he hopes will sufficiently challenge the promises of change or “parivartan” made by the prime minister.

Odd, too, that Amit Shah kept focusing on the negative aspects of the grand alliance, especially on Lalu Yadav’s “jungle raj”, instead of promoting the BJP’s plans for Bihar. Except for saying the PM will catapult Bihar into the national frontline, the big ideas were missing. In fact, there seemed little joy on the faces of those sitting in the front row –considering Jitan Ram Manjhi and Amit Shah had just reached a political bargain, which seems to have been achieved with the help of a few teeth being pulled out, neither seemed particularly gratified by the other’s presence.On Shah’s other side, meanwhile, Ram Vilas Paswan with 40 seats looked equally grim. For a party that is about to embark upon its toughest test, the whole atmosphere seemed rather funereal.

Perhaps that is to be expected when the stakes are so high. When the going gets tough, it is the spirit of camaraderie that keeps the tough going. Here, though, the overwhelming personality of the BJP president seems to have subsumed the smaller partners. Amit Shah kept the lion’s share of seats, as was natural, but he also showed the others their place in the larger scheme of things.