Damocles sword hangs over Shivraj Singh Chouhan?

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) high command has in the past eight years effectively defeated anti-incumbency in several states by changing chief ministers just before the assembly elections.

Take for example Uttarakhand and Gujarat. In both states, the BJP leadership changed chief ministers to retain power. Assam is the only exception as the BJP fought the 2021 assembly elections under Sarbanda Sonowal but replaced him after the polls with Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Both in Gujarat and Uttarakhand, the party appointed lightweights and fresh faces to beat the anti-incumbency. While Bhupendra Patel replaced Vijay Rupani in Gujarat, Pushkar Singh Dhami came in place of Tirath Singh Rawat in Uttarakhand. Dhami was the third chief minister of the hill state in six months as Tirath Singh Rawat had earlier replaced Trivendra Singh Rawat.

The move helped the BJP win the 2022 elections in Uttarakhand, which till then had changed the incumbent government after every five years.

Though Bhupendra Patel was the BJP's face in Gujarat, the elections were micro-managed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and union home minister Amit Shah.

In the just-concluded assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh, the BJP leadership decided to go with the then chief minister Jairam Ramesh and denied tickets to a large number of sitting legislators in order to overcome the anti-incumbency factor.

But the move proved counterproductive as the rebel candidates hurt the BJP's prospects in many constituencies resulting in the party's convincing defeat in the hill state, which also maintained its cyclic nature unlike Uttarakhand.

In 2023, there are assembly elections in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland.

Out of these, the BJP is in power in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Tripura and a key player in others. In Karnataka, the BJP replaced powerful Lingayat leader BS Yediyurappa with Basavaraj Bommai in July 2021 and less than a year later Manik Saha came in place of Biplab Kumar Deb as the Tripura chief minister.

The BJP has much at stake in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. It had narrowly lost the 2018 assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh but within 15 months the Congress government fell after the legislators supporting Jyotiraditya Scindia quit the grand old party following his differences with the then chief minister Kamal Nath.

Scindia and others later joined the BJP and he was subsequently rewarded with a berth in the union cabinet. Shivraj Singh Chouhan again assumed the reins of the state as its chief minister in 2020. In his fourth term now, he is facing a strong anti-incumbency against his government.

There is a strong buzz that the BJP high command is mulling to remove him any time before the elections due in November-December next year.

But the leadership is treading a cautious line given that Chouhan is deeply entrenched in the Madhya Pradesh politics and could play a spoilsport if axed unceremoniously.

The challenge before the BJP leadership is to find an acceptable face among a line of contenders.

In Rajasthan too, the BJP high command is facing a dilemma of whether to fight the elections under the leadership of former chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia or a fresh face. Like Chouhan, Scindia too has a lot of supporters in the state unit and could cause an upset for the party.

In both cases, it will be a tightrope walk for the BJP leadership.