The Aam Aadmi Party added more spice to the Punjab elections by choosing a phone-in programme to select its chief ministerial face. Though national convener Arvind Kejriwal thought he would build suspense on the name, Bhagwant Singh Mann swung the polls with 90 per cent endorsement, as there was no other serious contender. As expected, Kejriwal, too, got a few endorsements to lead the border state, but nowhere near Mann’s numbers.
The strategy has been a new one, even though the AAP has used phone polls to take policy decisions in the Delhi government. Opponents were sceptical on the numbers, as it was an in-house survey that was not independently verified. However, the party had no recourse to vox populi when Kejriwal had last year announced that former Army officer Ajay Kothiyal would be the chief ministerial face in Uttarakhand. Goa is another state where the party is active and Kejriwal has a different strategy there. He has only said that the chief ministerial face would be from the influential Bhandari caste, without specifying a face.
Arvind Kejriwal and Bhagwant Singh Mann | PTI
Regional parties normally have no confusion regarding their chief ministerial faces as invariably it is the party supremo—evident in 14 states. Pinarayi Vijayan is de-facto head of the CPI(M) in Kerala, though there is a national and state leadership at the organisational level. Both H.D. Deve Gowda of the JD(S) and Sharad Pawar of the NCP are above the state leadership fray in Karnataka and Maharashtra respectively, preferring projection of Gowda’s son H.D. Kumaraswamy and Pawar’s nephew Ajit as the chief ministerial face.
Another regional party trying to expand wings outside its home base is the Trinamool Congress, but it has struggled to find a chief ministerial face in Goa.
Kejriwal had battled a whisper campaign in the 2017 Punjab elections, when it was alleged he had ambitions to become the first non-Sikh chief minister of the state. Rahul Gandhi’s announcement then that Amarinder Singh would be the face of the Congress had dramatically swung fortunes away from the AAP and the NDA towards the Congress. Otherwise, the Congress normally maintains that its policy is for elected MLAs to choose their leader, even though in reality they authorise party president Sonia Gandhi to nominate a leader.
Likewise, the BJP’s parliamentary board picks the leader, like the surprise choice of Yogi Adityanath in 2017 when the BJP had swept Uttar Pradesh. One of the many reasons for the BJP’s poor performance in West Bengal last year was that it had no chief ministerial face acceptable to its own cadres, let alone voters.
There had been demands that Kejriwal announce a Sikh as chief ministerial candidate, as both the Congress and the Akali Dal are banking on Sikh votes. When the Congress dramatically overthrew Amarinder Singh and appointed a dalit as chief minister, the Akali Dal-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance announced that the deputy chief minister would be a dalit. The AAP, too, jumped on the bandwagon, stating its preference for a dalit deputy chief minister.
The BJP, which rules four of the five states going to polls, is comfortable projecting the incumbent chief ministers. Otherwise in states where it fights elections from the opposition ranks, the BJP generally does not project a chief ministerial face—an exception was in Karnataka in 2018 when B.S. Yediyurappa’s face was on all posters. However, at the national level, the party projects a prime ministerial face like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Narendra Modi.
Now in Punjab, Mann has to prove he is equally popular on the ground as he is on the phone!
sachi@theweek.in