2019 was marked by the re-election of Narendra Modi at the Centre. But it was also a significant year for a range of chief ministers. HT Correspondents bring a snapshot of what the year meant for nine chief ministers across the country:
2019 turned out to be the year when Uddhav Thackeray emerged as a leader in his own right. After five years of an acrimonious partnership with the Bharatiya Janata Party, Thackeray walked out and joined hands with ideologically opposite Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress to form a government in Maharashtra. Though he always nursed an ambition to be chief minister of the state, Thackeray was reluctant to head the government propped by the NCP.
Congress combine. With a little nudge by NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Thackeray took up the job.
Long seen as a pale shadow of his father Balasaheb Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, along with his son, Aaditya, has shepherded a transition in the Sena to a more moderate party. He showed his political acumen in working out a power-sharing pact with the two allies. At the same time, he is walking a fine line between the party’s strong Hindutva worldview and the secular policies of his allies speaking against the Citizenship Amendment Act one day and praising Veer Savarkar the next day. Thackeray is also reaching out to a new constituency rural population and farmers. Eight out of 12 Sena ministers sworn-in on December 30 come from a rural background.
2020 is here: A flashback ranking of India’s biggest newsmakers of 2019
However, through the year, Gehlot tightened his grip over government. Several Independents, most of whom were Congress rebels and contested after they were denied party tickets, came around to supporting him. The party also got one more MLA in January when results of Ramgarh constituency in Alwar were announced. (Elections here were countermanded due to death of a candidate and were held later.) But the biggest shot in his arm was when six legislators of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) joined the Congress, taking the party’s tally in the Assembly to 107.
However, the battle of one-upmanship between him and deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot persists. Ensuring that this competition does not affect the government will remain Gehlot’s key challenge.
For Kamal Nath, 2019 began with the daunting task of fulfilling his party’s promises made during the 2018 assembly elections held in November. He took oath on 17 December 2018, barely a fortnight ahead of the New Year. Some of the major promises were waiving farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh, providing allowances of Rs 4000 per month for five years to educated unemployed youths, setting up a Jan Aayog to bring to book those involved in infamous scams like Vyapam, closing down Vyapam (Vyavsayik Pareeksha Mandal) and replacing it with a new organization, withdrawing the then previous government’s order whereby government employees were allowed to attend Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shakhas, reducing Value Added Tax or VAT on petrol and diesel, bonus to farmers on crops and Rs 5 per liter bonus on milk, Gaushala in every panchayat, and a law guaranteeing the right to housing.
The government’s record on loan waiver has, however, been patchy, with many farmers complaining they are yet to get the relief on the ground. There was a partial implementation of the unemployment allowance for 100 days a year. The state is yet to see a Jan Aayog and closure of Vyapam. The government is yet to issue any order regarding RSS shakhas or employees’ participation in it. Instead of reducing the VAT on petrol and diesel, it was increased. The government claims to be working on gaushalas in 1,000 panchayats but these are yet to come up. Nath has also had to deal with criticism from within his party.
For Nath, if the government’s sheer survival (it has a thin majority) was the biggest success this year, the route in the Lok Sabha elections, where the party won only one of the state’s 29 seats, was the lowest point.
Amarinder Singh continued his winning run in the Lok Sabha elections and the state assembly polls. Of the 13 Lok Sabha seats, he managed to win eight seats with a 40% vote share, holding his own against the Narendra Modi wave. Though the party’s performance in the state fell short of initial expectations, the Punjab tally accounted for 15% of the seats won by the Congress nationally in the LS elections. The party then won three of the four seats in the assembly byelections, providing another boost to Singh in the face of brewing dissent.
Though the rumblings of discontent within the government and the state unit are growing over the handling of the Bargari sacrilege cases and the dominance of bureaucracy, the two-time chief minister has remained in firm control, clipping the wings of dissenting minister Navjot Singh Sidhu, and accommodating his loyalists. Besides matching the Akalis, move for move, on the Panthic turf in the year gone by, Singh has also countered the BJP’s nationalism pitch. He was among the first chief ministers to declare that he will not implement the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in his state, calling it “unethical and unconstitutional”.
In the last one year, Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel has focused primarily on tribal and farmers issues of the state. The Baghel-led Congress government hit the headlines with a series of decisions ranging from loan waiver and higher minimum support price for paddy to policies aimed to win tribal support in Maoist-affected areas, including through the possible withdrawal of cases.
But there are several challenges. Activists believe that the Baghel government has not been able to implement FRA and provisions of the Panchayats (Extension of Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996 in tribal areas. They also claim the government has not made any concrete policy on mining and mining developer and operator (MDO) model, which Baghel opposed when he was in opposition.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will complete three years in office in March. But this year may rank as the most challenging in his term so far due to a series of developments.
The first was the Ayodhya verdict by the Supreme Court, which paved the way for the construction of the temple. The second was the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests (one of the most intense in the country with as many as 20 deaths), and property attachment notices to hundreds of demonstrators accused of inciting and organizing protests. The third was the fierce opposition attack on Yogi Adityanath and his government over “deteriorating” law and order and “excesses” during CAA protests. In the middle, the Yogi government also saw a mini rebellion of the party’s own members of the legislative assembly.
Despite all these high-voltage events and speculation over the stability of the Yogi government, the fact is the chief minister has a brute majority and draws his power primarily from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the home minister and the BJP national president Amit Shah. And Modi, after all these series of events, on December 25 accepted Yogi’s offer to visit Lucknow to unveil the late prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s statue at the UP CM’s secretariat on Atal’s birth anniversary. And Modi’s made an emphatic statement on Yogi at the event. He said: “Good governance is only possible when one takes a comprehensive view. And I am glad that Yogi Adityanath is following this.”
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), or rather the protests raging across most parts of Assam in opposition to it, was the most prominent issue chief minister Sonowal faced during 2019. The year started with protests by dozens of indigenous groups against the proposed legislation. Sonowal’s personal assurances on how it would not impact Assam and Centre’s decision not to table the legislation in Rajya Sabha (and the Bill lapsing) ensured an end to the protests at that time.
But the scenario was not the same in December with the new government in Delhi passing CAA in both houses of parliament. Fearing threat to their identity, language, and culture due to the perceived increase in influx from Bangladeshi because of CAA, led most indigenous groups, student bodies in Assam to come out to the streets opposing the legislation. Sonowal, who is called Jatiya Nayak (Hero of the Community) due to his role in getting Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act withdrawn in 2005 is the main target of protesters this time as they feel the CM betrayed the Assam. Unaccustomed to such an attack, Sonowal’s year is ending in damage control mode where his government has announced a number of sops to various indigenous groups and personal efforts to turn the tide.
2019 saw Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar asserting his stamp not only in the National Democratic Alliance and in state politics but also at the Centre.
The political moves by Kumar remained in the news all through the year as he refused to have his party represented in the Union council of ministers, commanded the Janata Dal (United) to stage a walkout on legislations that made instant triple talaq a punishable offense and stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood and special status. But at the same time, he surprised everybody when his MPs voted in favor of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill — having opposed it nine months earlier.
Despite strong opposition from a section of leaders of BJP, the central leadership of the saffron party reposed faith in him and named him the leader for the 2020 Assembly elections.
Mamata Banerjee
For Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, 2019 was among the most challenging years in her political career.
Ever since she came to power in Bengal, ending the 34-year-long rule of the Marxists who appeared almost invincible till the early 2000s, Banerjee never suffered any significant defeat. This change in 2019, as the Bharatiya Janata Party won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal, increasing its tally from just two. Banerjee lost all the Lok Sabha seats in north Bengal and some important ones in the south. Analysis of the results and voting pattern made it apparent that she was losing the confidence of Hindus, backward classes as well as tribals. The results also made it apparent that TMC was losing ground in both urban and rural segments.
For Banerjee, who will face civic elections in 2020 and assembly elections in 2021, the year was nothing short of a big warning sign. But she spent the rest of the year going back to the drawing board, revising her strategy, hiring election strategist Prashant Kishor to help the TMC, and taking up, strongly, the issue of CAA and leading mass protests against it