Congress or BJP, why is it wrong to airdrop CMs by high command?

New Delhi: The Congress Legislature Party (CLP) in Karnataka has authorised the high command to select the next chief minister of the state.

That means the whole exercise of seeking the views of newly-elected legislators was a futile attempt.

Such legislature party meetings have been reduced to a farce over the years and this is true of all the political parties in India.

Ultimately, it will be the Congress high command (read Gandhi family here) that will decide whether to hand over the baton to former chief minister Siddaramaiah or state unit head D K Shivakumar.

Prior to Karnataka, the same procedure was adopted in Himachal Pradesh too. In fact, every state follows the same process.

However, the procedure adopted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is different from other parties.

In the saffron party, a chief minister is selected by the top brass (read Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah) and conveyed to the legislators.

Take for example, Manohar Lal Khattar in Haryana, Pushkar Dhami or his predecessors Trivendra Singh Rawat and Tirath Singh Rawat in Uttarakhand, Bhupendra Patel in Gujarat, Basavaraj Bommai in Karnataka, Manik Saha or his predecessor Biplab Deb in Tripura, Jairam Thakur in Himachal Pradesh, Raghubar Das in Jharkhand and Pramod Sawant in Goa.

All of them were surprise picks as nobody had considered them even to be in the reckoning.

The BJP high command had thrust them on the legislators and the state leadership. Unfortunately, none of them proved to be worthy of the post they held or are holding.

Dhami lost his seat in the 2022 assembly elections and was subsequently elected in a by-poll, the BJP performed badly under the leadership of Thakur in Himachal Pradesh and Bommai in Karnataka. The saffron party barely managed to hold on to power (courtesy Dushyant Chautala of the Jannayak Janta Party) in Haryana in the 2019 assembly elections under Khattar.

Bhupendra Patel had no role in the BJP's historic mandate in the 2022 elections. The party's election management was handled by the Prime Minister and Amit Shah.

Sawant returned to power in Goa due to massive infighting within Congress and the division of votes in the opposition camp. Similarly, Raghubar Das led the party to a humiliating defeat in Jharkhand.

That said, the BJP needs to change its strategy of foisting inconsequential leaders as chief ministers in states and instead project those with some mass base.

The saffron party also needs to bring about a significant change in its electoral strategy in states and stop its overdependence on Prime Minister Modi's charisma to sail the BJP through despite massive anti-incumbency against the local governments.

For its part, Congress should restore some credibility to the CLP and elect chief ministers as per the wishes of the majority. This will certainly strengthen the inner party democracy and make the workers key stakeholders in the government. Seems difficult but possible.