Fine balance: Social coalition is BJP's Uttarakhand mantra

In a balancing act to retain its social coalition intact in the hill state, BJP on Friday appointed MLA Madan Kaushik as its Uttarakhand state President two days after it named Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat to replace Trivendra Singh Rawat as Chief Minister.

While keeping a member from the Thakur community in the top seat, BJP chose to go back to its old formula of giving one of the two posts to a Brahmin by anointing Kaushik as state chief who replaced the incumbent Banshidhar Bhagat.

Bhagat is likely to be inducted as a minister in the Tirath-led government. Kaushik, a four-term MLA, was a Cabinet minister in the earlier Trivendra Singh Rawat-led government. Generally both Congress and BJP has maintained this social coalition in power politics of Uttarakhand where Rajputs and Brahmins are the two most populous castes nearly 35 and 25 percent of total population respectively).

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BJP has to keep the social coalition all the more in mind this time as the state goes to polls next year. In the neighbouring UP which also goes to polls next year, Opposition parties are currently aggressively trying to woo back Brahmins by setting up the Brahmin Chetna Manch and promising a 108-foot idol of Parshuram.

However, numerically, the Brahmins are more significant in Uttarakhand than UP. In the 2017 Assembly polls, Congress had hedged its bet on Thakur-Brahmin combo of Harish Rawat and Kishor Upadhyay. It did not work. However, in the 2002 Assembly polls, Congress had romped home with Narayan Dutt Tiwari as CM face and Rawat as state chief. In 2014, Congress Chief Minister Harish Rawat had announced a monthly pension for five lakh priests after which the BJP alleged that the decision was aimed at helping the Congress to secure its Brahmin vote bank.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BJP had, in sort of a social engineering move, fielded Tirath Singh Rawat from Brahmin-dominated Pauri Garhwal constituency and a Brahmin face Ajay Bhatt from Nainital, a Thakur seat. Both won their respective seats, a move that helped the BJP blunt the sharp edges of Brahmin Thakur rivalry in the state to some extent.

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Even this time when the party had to agree to replace Trivendra with Tirath on Wednesday as CM, owing to the banner of revolt raised by the group that resented his style of functioning, caste rivalry was not a factor.

A day after taking oath as the new chief minister of Uttarakhand, Tirath Singh Rawat met his political mentor and state’s former CM, Gen (Retd) B C Khanduri and sought his blessings. Khandhuri, who belongs to the Brahmin community, was formery with the defence services before he dabbled into politics and had twice been Chief Minister of the state. Rawat said the " General sir" was like his father. Khanduri hailed him as a "worthy person" having become CM.