Gujarat’s new chief minister Bhupendra Patel with Union Home Minister Amit Shah
By Rathin Das*
Ahmedabad: Dropping all members of the outgoing council of ministers en masse from the new ministry of the same party is simply unprecedented in Indian politics, a feat not attempted even by Indira Gandhi in her heydays.
But that is exactly what happened in Gujarat yesterday when the new Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel excluded all the 22 members of the outgoing Vijay Rupani ministry from his council of ministers.
Even a political novice can make out that such a drastic decision in present day Bharatiya Janata Party cannot be taken by a hitherto unknown legislator hand-picked by the party high command eager to project a Patel face in Gujarat one year ahead of the assembly elections due in 2022.
What message does the BJP leadership want to send out may remain a mystery for long. Was the entire pack of 22 led by Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and his Deputy Nitin Patel proved incompetent to run their respective departments? After all, many of these dropped ministers were members of the Cabinet led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi till the time he became the Prime Minister.
A top BJP leader described the new ministry with only new faces as a ‘democratic experiment’ undertaken by the party.
Not only that the 22 were dropped but the fact that any rebellion by their supporters was successfully quelled also speaks volumes of the party’s top leadership’s grip on the BJP in Gujarat, the home state of the Prime Minister. Have they been ‘cut to size’, as per the strategy followed by many leaders with anyone growing fast in stature even though as many as three Congress turncoats have been included in the new ministry?
While Vijay Rupani or even Nitin Patel can be accommodated in any of the Raj Bhawans across the country, the BJP needs to be careful with others dropped. Their roots in the BJP’s parent organization RSS may prevent them from joining any other party, but such senior leaders going inactive may affect the electorate’s psyche at the time of polling.
As though dropping of all the 22 of the previous regime was not enough, there was another surprise from the new chief minister in the form of a Gujarat government advertisement in local newspapers today.
In the full-page advertisement issued to mark the 71st birthday of the Prime Minister, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel’s photograph appears a notch above that of Modi, yet another unprecedented phenomenon since 2014. The only consolation is that Modi’s photo is in full standing position while Patel’s is only of upper half, but slightly bigger in profile.
Also read: Does a new Patel CM in Gujarat signify BJP’s olive branch to the Patidars?
Coming as it did within three days of Modi’s photo appearing in BJP posters as equal to other leaders, it is a clear signal that the Prime Minister might have given the ‘green signal’ to play himself down on his birthday that falls today.
Nevertheless, a 71-feet cutout of Modi, a 710-kg cake, a 71-feet long Rangoli and tree plantations marked the Prime Minister’s 71st birthday celebrations in his native state.
*The writer is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal.
