BHOPAL: Eight days after the BJP bucked anti-incumbency of its 18 years rule with a stunning win in Madhya Pradesh assembly elections, the saffron party sprung a real surprise, by choosing third-time MLA from Ujjain district and state’s higher education minister Dr Mohan Yadav as MP’s next chief minister on Monday.
Yadav, the third-time MLA from Ujjain Dakshin seat of Ujjain district (which forms part of state’s 66 assembly seats-strong Malwa-Nimar region) was elected the BJP legislature party leader at the meeting of 163 newly elected legislators of the ruling party at state party HQ in Bhopal amid the presence of the three central observers, including Haryana CM ML Khattar.
Being seen as an OBC politician with strong RSS backing, the 58-year-old Yadav, whose was nowhere in the race for CM, has been accredited with furthering the Sangh’s saffron agenda in MP’s higher education system through moves like introducing Ramcharitmanas as optional subject and the Preface to Mahabharata by C Rajgopalachari in the English Foundation Course to BA First Year students in universities and colleges of the state as part of the New Education Policy (NEP).
With MP long seen as RSS-BJP’s lab of political experiments, the saffron party came out with an OBC-Dalit-Brahmin social engineering formula. While the ruling party continued its 20-years-long tradition of opting for an OBC face as CM (after Uma Bharti, Late Babulal Gaur and Shivraj Singh Chouhan), it also came out with the Dalit-Brahmin combination for deciding the two deputy CMs.
This will be the first time that Madhya Pradesh will have two deputy CMs. It’s after 20 years that MP will have a deputy CM, as the state last had Congress’s tribal leader Jamuna Devi as deputy CM till 2003.
Voter base
The Yadavs hold decisive sway in around 60 Lok Sabha seats of UP, Bihar and MP. While around 25-30 Lok Sabha seats out of the 80 seats in UP (which include regions of central MP, Rohilkhand and eastern UP) have sizeable Yadav population, around 17 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar have a politically powerful Yadav voters base.