Deadlock in BJP? Why 7 key states still await elections for chiefs
In Karnataka, more than a year after the 2024 Lok Sabha poll setback and the May 2023 assembly election defeat, the BJP has yet to resolve its leadership tussle. The state unit is split between the Lingayat old guard, led by B.S. Yediyurappa, and his arch rivals.Yediyurappa's younger son and MLA B.Y. Vijayendra is the current state unit chief, and has the backing of the national leadership for re-election. However, BJP national general secretary B.L. Santhosh continues to rally his opponents. These include former chief minister and Lok Sabha MP Basavaraj Bommai, who, along with others, is reportedly insisting on anyone but Vijayendra for the role.The lack of a clear post-Yediyurappa consensus, combined with worries about the upcoming Bengaluru municipal elections and the erosion of Lok Sabha seats, has paralysed decision-making. The party still has no credible alternative to Yediyurappa and his son to consolidate the powerful Lingayat vote base and build a broader caste coalition.BJP leaders privately acknowledge that replacing Yediyurappa with Bommai in July 2021 had damaged the party's support base. With the next assembly elections due in 2028 and the ruling Congress seen as drifting into factionalism, the BJP leadership is keen to keep its house intact.In Gujarat, a state the party has ruled for the past three decades, the delay is less about procedural lapses and more about turf wars. C.R. Patil, though nearing the end of his extended tenure, continues to hold informal sway. The central leadership is caught between Patil's entrenched organisational grip, chief minister Bhupendra Patel's camp and local leaders jockeying for prominence. There's also an underlying caste calculation—balancing Patidar dominance with rising OBC aspirations, especially as the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have made modest inroads.advertisementUttar Pradesh, the BJP's most important electoral base, is the most sensitive case. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath's growing stature and his tight control over both governance and messaging have made the central leadership cautious. Any new state president seen as too close to Adityanath risks upsetting power equations in Delhi.Any state chief perceived as imposed from the top could provoke resistance in Lucknow. After the party's underwhelming Lok Sabha poll performance in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Ayodhya in 2024, the leadership has not yet found a consensus candidate who can both complement and counterbalance Adityanath. The post-poll introspection highlighted growing differences between the government and the organisation. The hard bargain over this balance is delaying the appointment.In Haryana, the BJP continues to operate under the shadow of former chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar. Though he has moved to the national stage, Khattar has left behind a fractured organisation. The central leadership has yet to decide whether to bank on Khattar's legacy or elevate leaders from other factions.advertisementLast month, Union minister Rao Inderjit Singh flexed his muscles by hosting a dinner for 11 BJP MLAs and Congress legislator Manju Chaudhary at his daughter Aarti Rao's new residence in Chandigarh. Singh, a Congress turncoat, has a strong base in south Haryana and adjoining parts of Rajasthan, but his advancing age is a concern. Current state president Mohan Lal Badoli is both a close aide of chief minister Nayab Singh Saini and seen as part of the Khattar camp. The resulting deadlock has left the state unit rudderless at a critical juncture.In Punjab, the BJP's organisational drift has deepened. The party is still without district-level presidents in several key areas, and state chief Sunil Jakhar—originally brought in for his Congressman gravitas—has become increasingly disengaged and now even seen as a liability by some quarters. Party insiders complain Jakhar has tried to run the BJP like the Congress without understanding the party's or the Sangh Parivar's DNA.The sudden death of state in-charge Vijay Rupani in the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad in June further created a vacuum. On July 7, the BJP appointed party old-timer Ashwani Sharma as working president of the Punjab unit. He will now work with general secretary (organisation) Mantri Srinivas to accelerate the appointment of district-level chiefs.advertisementThe Punjab unit lacks direction, with cadre demoralised cadre and no clear revival plan in a state where the party had once hoped to emerge as the main Opposition. All eyes are on Sharma to rebuild momentum before the assembly polls in 2027.In Delhi, despite sweeping all seven Lok Sabha seats in 2024 and defeating AAP resoundingly in the assembly polls, the party has dithered over finalising a state president. District chiefs have been elected and the morale is high, but the leadership is weighing whether to continue with incumbent Virendra Sachdeva or bring in a more visible face to energise the cadre. With a 'triple engine' government—BJP at the Centre, in the state and in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi—the job of the next state unit chief becomes even more critical. While the BJP is on a strong wicket in the state, replacing Sachdeva too quickly may cause internal friction.Jharkhand presents an ongoing caste conundrum. After a decent performance in the Lok Sabha and assembly polls, the BJP is struggling to strike the right caste balance. The party is torn between projecting a tribal leader to challenge the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) or consolidating its non-tribal base. Senior leader Babulal Marandi remains influential but is seen as past his peak. The delay reflects the party's broader indecision over the tribal-versus-OBC leadership debate—critical in the state's polarised political climate.advertisementIn Manipur, political activity is effectively frozen. Ethnic tensions between Meitei and Kuki groups have made any organisational reshuffle unviable. Former chief minister N. Biren Singh faced opposition from within his own MLAs and has lost credibility among both communities. The state is under president's rule to restore normalcy. With law and order still fragile and the Centre treading carefully, the BJP is avoiding any visible changes that could further destabilise the situation.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsMust Watch
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Congress and the OBCs
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Inaction on Kalelkar report The clamour for greater political representation for the backward classes, as well as demands for reservation for these communities on the lines of the quotas in government jobs for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), began soon after Independence. In 1953, the government of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up the first Backward Classes Commission under Rajya Sabha member Dattatreya Balkrishna Kalelkar, popularly known as 'Kaka' Kalelkar. The Kalelkar Commission report, submitted to the government on March 30, 1955, formulated criteria for identifying socially and educationally backward classes, and made several recommendations for their uplift. These included a caste census in 1961 that was to be advanced to 1957, treating all women as a class as 'backward', and reserving 70% seats in technical and professional institutions for qualified students from backward classes. The recommendations were, however, not unanimous, and three of the members were opposed to the acceptance of caste as a criterion for social backwardness and reservation in government jobs. Kalelkar himself wrote a long letter to President Rajendra Prasad expressing his disagreement on a number of issues. The report was tabled before both houses of Parliament but never discussed. Nehru's government did not implement it. First quota for OBCs Meanwhile, OBCs in the Hindi heartland had already begun to move towards the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. Until Lohia's untimely demise in 1967, his anti-Congress politics was powered by these communities. By the 1970s, OBC politics had gained significant momentum to pressure state governments to take decisions regarding OBC reservation. For instance, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna in October 1975 appointed the Most Backward Classes Commission under the chairmanship of Chhedi Lal Sathi. This first push for an OBC quota in UP came under a Congress government. And it was another Congress government, of Chief Minister N D Tiwari, that the state cabinet announced a 15% quota in government jobs for OBCs in UP, in April 1977. Within a week of this decision, however, Tiwari's government was dismissed by the Janata Party government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai that had routed the Congress in the Hindi heartland in the post-Emergency elections of March 1977. As a result, it was the Janata government in UP, led by Ram Naresh Yadav, which ultimately implemented the OBC quota — and also took the credit for it. The Mandal challenge In 1978, Prime Minister Desai constituted a new commission for the OBCs. The Second OBC Commission, headed by former Bihar Chief Minister B P Mandal, submitted its report to the government on December 31, 1980. By this time, the Congress under Indira Gandhi was back in power. Over the next nine years, however, neither Indira nor her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi implemented the Mandal Commission report, which recommended a 27% quota for OBCs in central government jobs and public universities. It was only in 1990, that the government of Prime Minister V P Singh announced its intention to implement the report, unleashing a wave of OBC assertion and fundamentally altering the politics of North India — to the Congress' detriment. In his 2006 biography of V P Singh, Manzil Se Zyada Safar, Ram Bahadur Rai quoted the former PM as having said: 'Congress leaders were obsessed with power equations. They were least concerned with the social equations and changes taking place… and thus unable to read the Mandal phenomenon.' The BJP, at that time still considered a largely Brahmin-Bania party, however, was far more flexible. For instance, it projected OBC leaders such as Kalyan Singh, a Lodh Rajput, in UP, to counter Mulayam. As Mulayam's support base outside the Samajwadi Party's Yadav-Muslim core started to fragment, Kalyan rallied smaller OBC communities behind the BJP, eventually forging a non-Yadav OBC vote bank. The BJP would eventually revamp its leadership at every level to accommodate OBCs politically. This was crucial from the late 1990s onwards, as the Panchayat Raj Act and reservation of seats in every level of three-tier rural and urban panchayats, provided an avenue for many OBC leaders to emerge from the grassroots. This was even as Congress' organisation continued to erode, and struggled to truly accommodate OBC politics. In UPA years In 2006, Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh pushed through 27% reservation for OBCs in admissions to central educational institutions, which had been pending since the implementation of the Mandal report. This was one of the biggest decisions in favour of OBCs, and a defining moment in OBC politics — but hardly any political gains accrued to the Congress. In 2010, the UPA-2 government tried to move for a caste census. Then Law Minister Veerappa Moily wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about collecting caste/ community data in Census 2011. But Home Minister P Chidambaram opposed the decision in Lok Sabha. Singh's government ultimately decided to conduct a full Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) instead. The SECC data was published in 2016 but remains unavailable today. The Narendra Modi government has said it is 'not reliable'. This means that seven decades after the Kalelkar Commission recommended a caste census, there is still no precise estimate of India's OBC population. Rahul Gandhi's push for a caste census in recent years is an acceptance of the many missed opportunities during decades of Congress rule in the past, and a realignment of the party's politics with a view of taking on the BJP.
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