New Delhi: Five days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won big in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, there was still no indication of who will be the chief ministers of these states. The party contested the elections with a model of “collective leadership” anchored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.While the BJP may be spoilt for choice, given the large mandate it received, one wonders if the ‘delay’ was caused by indecision, failure in building consensus or if it is strategic. Either way, it is a commentary on the lack of transparency within India’s ruling party.The party has appointed observers in the three states, following which legislature party meetings will be held. For Rajasthan, defence minister Rajnath Singh, Vinod Tawade and Saroj Pandey will be the observers; in Madhya Pradesh, the observers are Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, K. Laxman, Asha Lakra; Union ministers Arjun Munda and Sarbananda Sonowal, and Dushyant Gautam will be the observers in Chhattisgarh.Despite the centralised mode of functioning under Modi and his trusted lieutenant, Union home minister Amit Shah, the factionalism within the party’s state units of the party is no secret.It must be recalled that after losing the Karnataka assembly election earlier this year, the BJP took almost six months before deciding its leader of opposition. According to reports, the delay in picking a leader of the opposition and carrying out an organisational rejig was due to a “feud” between the camps led by the BJP’s powerful national general secretary (organisation) B.L Santhosh and former chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa.Back in 2017, the BJP won a comprehensive victory in Uttar Pradesh without declaring an official CM face – a strategy similar to the recently concluded Modi-led elections. The party took more than a week before zeroing in on Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister. Remarkably, Adityanath was not among the 325 elected NDA MLAs but a sitting MP from Gorakhpur and it was evident that he was planted to the top post by the central leadership.Now in December 2023, with multiple claimants to the top post in the three states, speculation is rife whether the brass, which enjoys supreme authority in such matters, was unable to finalise its best options.This turned into a matter of political scrutiny on Thursday, when senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wondered why the BJP was still unable to announce its CMs for Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. On the other hand, Revanth Reddy of the Congress formally took charge as chief minister of Telangana on Thursday.“Less than 24 hours after the election results were out on December 3rd, the Congress party was being criticised in the media by all and sundry for a so-called ‘delay’ in appointing a CM for Telangana. Well, our CM was announced day before and is taking over at 1pm today…Why is the BJP not being called out for what is actually a delay?” Ramesh tweeted.Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi also questioned the BJP over the party’s delay in deciding CMs.“They have got a majority. The elected MLAs need to decide who will be the leader (CM). But that process has been done with in the BJP. Only two people decide who will be the CM. They are Narendra Modiji and Amit Shahji,” Chaturvedi told a news agency outside Parliament.Chaturvedi also linked it to the alleged vacuum in governance.She said the law-and-order situation in Rajasthan – where the chief of a caste-based supremacist group was murdered two days after the results of the election – had collapsed. Had the Congress been in power, there would have been “100 TV debates” on it already, she said.Large sections of the media have played the story of the BJP’s ‘delay’ through the lens of anticipation and suspense, rather than asking questions of the decision-making process.Amid questions by the opposition parties, a national general secretary of the BJP, Kailash Vijayvargiya, told media persons in Bhopal that the wait could end on Sunday, December 10.“Is there something in the constitution which says that a CM must be announced in these many days,” he asked, adding that the party will declare the CMs when it finds it fit. When journalists asked Vijayvargiya if the party’s choice for CM in Madhya Pradesh would be someone from within its elected MLAs in the 230-member assembly or someone else, he gave no clear answer.Kailash Vijayvargiya. Photo: Facebook//KailashOnlineWith the delay mounting, there have been signs of muscle-flexing from some of the top contenders in these states. On Monday, Vasundhara Raja, a former chief minister who is hoping to make a comeback, met with around 25 MLAs at her residence, in what many perceived to be a show of strength. On Thursday, Raje met BJP president J.P. Nadda in Delhi. What transpired in the meeting was not publicly known.C.P. Joshi, the BJP’s Rajasthan president, downplayed Raje’s visit to Delhi. Joshi told a news channel that it was “natural” for Raje, a party vice-president, to travel to Delhi and congratulate the top leadership of the party on the recent win.“The Parliamentary Board of the party will decide [who will be the leader of the legislature party]. It will be a party worker, and whatever the top leadership will decide will be in the interest of the state,” said Joshi.Eleven sitting BJP MPs who contested the elections were also elected to the assemblies and there is a strong possibility that they could get bigger roles in state politics.With three current or former CMs in contention in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and MP – Raman Singh, Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan – the BJP may be facing a dilemma: stick with the old warhorses, also the most popular state leaders, or experiment with fresh faces to develop future leadership and strengthen the grip of the central leadership.That the party’s central leadership had cut Raje and Chouhan down to size was already indicated when they were not declared official CM candidates and the party decided to field several MPs in the state elections. That strategy may have worked electorally but how smoothly would it translate into power sharing, only time will tell.Like Raje, who has been active ever since the results were declared, Chouhan too has already made attempts to race ahead of others in the image game. On December 6 and 7, he held workers’ meets and Ladli Behna events in Chhindwara and Sheopur, respectively. He especially interacted with women, whom he has tried to cultivate as a voter base over the years.In Chhindwara, which is Congress state president Kamal Nath’s turf, Chouhan launched the BJP’s ‘Mission 29’ for the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Chhindwara was the only parliamentary seat of the 29 in Madhya Pradesh that the BJP failed to win in 2019.Chouhan, the Budhni MLA who hopes to become chief minister for the fifth time, credited the victory in Madhya Pradesh to the people’s faith in Modi but also asserted the role of the flagship schemes he ran for women as another reason for the big mandate. “The amazing journey from Ladli Laxmi to Ladli Behna,” said Chouhan, also crediting the “double-engine government” for properly implementing the schemes of the Union government.However, in a curious comment on the factors behind the party’s win in MP, Vijayvargiya, seen as a rival of Chouhan for the CM post, tried to downplay the role of the Ladli Behna Scheme. This may be interpreted as his way of moderating the credit received by Chouhan for the BJP’s dominating performance.“Was there the Ladli Behna Yojana in Chhattisgarh? Was it there in Rajasthan? The victory in Chhattisgarh was a big win and bigger than MP,” Vijayvargiya said, crediting “only and only Modi’s leadership, Amit Shah’s strategy and J.P. Nadda ’s polling booth and panna pramukh yojanas” for the three wins. The common factor in these three states was the leadership of Modi, he insisted.Vijayvargiya, the Indore-1 MLA, was among the 163 BJP legislators elected in Madhya Pradesh on December 3.