The dawn of two stars in Indian Politics

The national general elections are almost a year away, and Rahul Gandhi has concluded his Bharat Jodo Yatra demarcating the ideological lines for the 2024 elections. The yatra might have changed the public perception of Rahul Gandhi to some extent and also would have re-energized his party workers. Though, this yatra translating into electoral gains for the INC seems implausible, as a recent survey showed a jump in Modi's approval ratings from what it was during the pandemic years. Even if the entire opposition unites and forms a Mahagatbandhan 2.0. The question of if not Modi, then who? is enough for BJP to form the government at the center. Let us leave the opposition aside. They still might not have figured out an answer to the above question, but the BJP will soon need to answer the same question after the 2024 elections. Assuming the BJP and RSS continue with their maximum age policy, Modi would have to pave the way for someone else and move to Margdarshan Mandal. Even the successor might not know that he would be the next in line, but it now looks like at least two stars who seem to have national ambitions have dawned.

The year was 2017, and BJP, after a long exile from power in Uttar Pradesh, won a landslide victory in Modi's name. To everyone's surprise, Yogi Adityanath was made the state's chief minister. As has been the case with other BJP chief ministers after the advent of Modi on the national stage, they are installed as the chief ministers but are not heavy-weight leaders themselves. But it seems Yogi Adityanath seized the opportunity and might have succeeded in tilting the power balance. With his Hindu nationalist image and being someone who tolerates no-nonsense, he grew in popularity. Using a bulldozer to teach criminals a lesson, bringing in a more stringent ordinance on cow slaughter, a law on love jihad, and talking about implementing UCC in the state made Modi look softer on such issues in the eyes of the BJP voters. His clout has grown such that other BJP chief ministers are taking a cue from him in their own states. And till the time his government came up for the elections in 2022, he had cemented himself as someone who would succeed Modi as "after Modi Yogi" slogans started catching the public imagination. In his second term, he positioned himself as a man with a plan to change the destiny of UP by making the state a model state on all parameters. His rise is also visible in that in his second term, there have been deliberate attempts from New Delhi to restrict Yogi's rise, and one can sense a level of discomfort between the BJP's top leadership and Yogi. The appointment of Modi's confidant to overlook development works in Varanasi also had become a bone of contention. This confirms that Yogi has national ambitions, and the present BJP dispensation is not ready for it yet as he didn't get the elevation to BJP's parliamentary board.

Another star that seems to be rising apparently got imported from the INC in Assam. Yes, I am talking about the current chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sharma. He is very popular in the North East and looks after the entire northeast for the BJP. How important he is to the BJP, you can see from the fact that the BJP removed their incumbent chief minister and made Himanta Sharma the next chief minister of the state. If you read through his tweets, he often tweets in Hindi, which is not the language his constituents speak as their first language. But this seems to be part of a larger scheme of things to get a wider reach outside his home state Assam. He is styling himself on the same Hindu nationalist lines as Modi and Yogi, which apparently is not the ideology he originally comes from, but what is politics, if not hypocrisy? If you have observed him, he speaks like a seasoned BJP politician on polarising matters though he has been associated with BJP for the last few years. He often wades into polarising public issues, the latest one when he struck headlines with his Who is SRK statement. But to his credit, after Yogi, if there is a BJP chief minister who hits national headlines often, it is Himanta Sharma. His ambition and style of politics find resonance outside Assam, proven by the fact that he was among 40-star campaigners who campaigned in the Gujarat elections. He was also a central player in securing defections from INC in Goa, and the rebel Shiv Sena MLAs camped while they staged the coup against the Thackeray's. If you extrapolate his journey going national seems a logical progression.

The dawn of these two stars, one in India's heartland and another in the east, does give us a direction in which the wind is blowing, but which star's dawn sees the light of the day, only time will tell.

Image Credits: Himanta Biswa Sharma twitter.