File photo of a person wearing a mask of PM ModiLike in all parties, posters play an important role in the power tussles within BJP. Uttar Pradesh, the biggest assembly battleground for the party, is seeing a right royal fight among aspirants who want to be nominated as the chief ministerial candidate of the party.
A week ago, the ancient city of Allahabad was plastered with posters of party Lok Sabha member Varun Gandhi during the national executive meeting.
Now the posters of Indira Gandhi's grandson have been removed, and there are posters, which are demanding that state BJP president Keshav Chandra Maurya should be made the face of the assembly elections. A few hundred kilometers away to the east, in another Hindu holy city, the posters proclaim the candidature of Adityanath, the Lok Sabha member from Gorakhpur, who is also the head of the richest temple in Uttar Pradesh. Far to the west, in Muzaffarnagar, the flavor is for union minister of state Sanjeev Balyan, the Jat face of the party, whom the opposition accused of religious polarization.
Since winning the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, Narendra Modi has not adopted a consistent policy on chief ministerial candidates. Without identifying a face, the party had won Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkand. It had brought outsider Kiran Bedi at the last minute in Delhi but the gamble did not work. Next, in Bihar, the party projected no one, but said it had enough in-house talent, but the voters rejected the BJP lock, stock and barrel. A chastened BJP reaped a rich harvest in Assam by projecting the youthful union minister Sarbananda Sonowal.
But Uttar Pradesh is the most complex among the states where BJP has done well in the last Lok Sabha elections, but the pulls of caste are strong. The only leader who is known across the state and commands respect of the cadres is union home minister Rajnath Singh, who has been state chief minister and party president. But Singh, who is number two in the central cabinet does not want to go back to the state. He had a soft corner for Varun Gandhi, when the former was the party's national president. Gandhi, who along with his mother and union minister Maneka Gandhi, is estranged politically from Sonia Gandhi's Congress, reckons he has the best credentials to lead the party. He is in his second term as Lok Sabha member, and won this time from Sultanpur, which is part of the Rae Bareily-Amethi area, which has elected three generations of Gandhis, including his grandparents Firoze and Indira Gandhi, uncle and aunt Rajiv and Sonia, his father Sanjay and cousin Rahul.
Yet the problem is that ever since Modi was projected as the BJP's prime ministerial candidate in 2013, Varun Gandhi and the former have failed to develop a personal chemistry. Amit Shah, who succeeded Rajnath Singh as the party president, did not take Gandhi into his team, and the party had sent a message to Varun that he was not wanted in Allahabad. But Varun, who had maintained a low profile during the first two years of Modi, is in a mood to assert himself, as his supporters have become restless. But the supporters of Maurya, Baliyan and Adityanath, are also impatient. Union minister Kalraj Mishra, who is a party veteran, is seen as the Brahmin face of the party, but lacks dynamism.
There have been suggestions in media that Smriti Irani, the fast risen star in BJP after she was asked to fight Rahul Gandhi in Amethi, should be made the chief ministerial candidate. She is an aggressive politician, but is not from the state.
The hopes of another union minister, Umabharati, who was chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and belongs to the extreme backward Lodh caste, has not found traction in party circles, as she represents Jhansi, which is in an extreme corner of the state.
But Modi and Shah have kept their choice of the chief ministerial candidate close to their chest, even though Modi had praised veterans like Mishra and former national president Murli Manohar Joshi as his mentors. Meanwhile, the poster war is likely to escalate in the coming weeks and months.
