New Delhi: Contaminated drinking water leading to deaths in Indore, rising air pollution in the national capital Delhi, widespread protests over the murder of Ankita Bhandari in Uttarakhand, illegal mining in the Aravallis in Rajasthan – the new year has brought focus on a spate of governance failures.At the centre of these crises in Madhya Pradesh, New Delhi, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan, lie Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief ministers, Mohan Yadav, Rekha Gupta and Pushkar Singh Dhami, respectively. In another BJP-ruled state, Odisha, chief minister Mohan Majhi is also facing criticism over increasing instances of violence against minorities, particularly after a Christian pastor was allegedly assaulted by a Hindutva mob.As in the case of its new party president, Nitin Nabin, the party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, has picked up almost the least known of workers and pushed them to occupy high office. A string of BJP chief ministers, many of whom have been appointed in the last three years, are the latest examples of such ‘unknowns’ entrusted with enormous power, state machinery and responsibility. In the case of five states, recently, it is infamy over some damning incidents that has pushed their lack of administrative and political acumen onto centre stage.According to political observers, the move to appoint political lightweights follows a “deliberate centralising strategy”, and despite governance failures the party’s brand equity lies not in governance but in Hindu nationalism, strongman leadership and identity politics.“The BJP’s recurring decision to appoint relatively unknown or politically lightweight figures as chief ministers, and now even as party president, reflects a deliberate centralising strategy,” said Zoya Hasan, Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Their political insignificance ensures that real authority remains firmly concentrated in the hands of the Prime Minister’s Office and the party high command. ‘Nobodies’ are far easier to manage and control. The consequences are visible in governance failures as in Indore, for example, or in repeated infrastructure collapses. Inexperienced leaders lack both the confidence and the political capital to take decisive action, manage crises, or push back against bureaucratic inertia.”The Wire takes a look at these chief ministers, who they are, and why they are facing questions of governance failures.Rekha Gupta, New DelhiIn Delhi, where the BJP won assembly elections in February 2025, forming government in the national capital for the first time in over a decade, the party followed the now conventional template under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah of elevating lesser known leaders. Rekha Gupta belongs to the Bania community, considered among the core BJP support base and is the only woman out of the BJP’s 14 chief ministers across India. She was a shock pick, who rose, bypassing her more well known colleagues in the Delhi unit including Parvesh Verma, Ashish Sood, Virendra Sachdeva, Vijender Gupta and Satish Upadhyay.While Gupta was said to be close to the RSS due to her long association with the organisation since the beginning of her political career, her electoral trajectory has seen more losses than wins. Gupta had contested from north-west Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh constituency unsuccessfully in 2015 and 2020. She was defeated by the AAP’s Shelly Oberoi in the 2023 Delhi mayoral elections. However, in the 2025 assembly elections she defeated her AAP rival Bandana Kumari by over 29,500 votes.In the last year, Gupta has faced criticism for her gaffes and handling of the rising air pollution in the national capital, including several government-run open-access websites that publish real time monitoring of air quality were unavailable for several hours during peak firecracker time on Diwali day. As winter has seeped in and air pollution levels have risen, reports have shown that two-thirds of the capital does not even have air quality monitors. Amid reports of tampering with air quality monitors, water being sprayed around monitors to keep readings low, the government has claimed that Delhi recorded the cleanest air in eight years despite the claims being evidently unbelievable.Mohan Yadav, Madhya PradeshIn 2023, after the BJP’s victory in the assembly polls, the saffron party chose Mohan Yadav instead of picking from its crop of experienced leaders including its longest-serving chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who had led the party to victory after over two decades in power in the state. Yadav is a three-term MLA from the Ujjain (South) seat. His elevation was part of the same template followed in other Hindi heartland states that the BJP won that year, where it picked lesser known leaders over experienced legislators. While Yadav was chosen to lead Madhya Pradesh, in Chhattisgarh the party picked Vishnu Deo Sai, and in Rajasthan, Bhajan Lal Sharma was made the chief minister.Yadav was made the Madhya Pradesh chief minister following the high command’s decision that overlooked other tall leaders like Kailash Vijayvargiya, Narendra Singh Tomar and Prahlad Singh Patel. Yadav was known for his proximity to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and sharp Hindutva rhetoric. The Wire has reported that his elevation as chief minister left even his party colleagues baffled. Unlike Chouhan who had been a Lok Sabha MP five times, or his predecessor Uma Bharti, also a national leader, Yadav’s influence was limited to the Ujjain district and had barely spanned the state level. But making a person from the Yadav community was seen as a response to the powerful Yadav-led opposition leadership that the BJP was facing challenges from in Bihar and UP. Yadav’s financial assets, incidentally, have witnessed an exponential growth from Rs 16 crore (2013) to 42 crore in 10 years of his being an MLA and minister. The deaths in Indore’s Bhagirathpura related to water contamination, with residents alleging that 24 persons have died so far of a vomiting and diarrhoea outbreak, has shone harsh light on Yadav’s ineptness in state governance. In October, six children died in Chhindwara district after taking contaminated cough syrup. Meanwhile communal incidents have continued in the state with reports of mob attacks, including two consecutive incidents in Jabalpur during Christmas, as well as incidents of lynching by purported cow vigilantes.Pushkar Singh Dhami, UttarakhandIn Uttarakhand, the BJP government under Pushkar Singh Dhami is facing sustained protests for its handling of the Ankita Bhandari murder case. Following mass protests and public outrage across the state against possible shielding of a ‘VIP’, identified as BJP’s national general secretary Dushyant Kumar Gautam by an aggrieved actress and former wife of an ex-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA, Urmila Sanawar, the Dhami government has finally approved a CBI probe earlier this month in the 2022 murder case.Dhami was brought in to replace Tirath Singh Rawat as chief minister in 2021. His efforts in fighting anti-incumbency in the state including Muslim anger against the BJP’s divisive agenda in the state resulted in the saffron party returning to power in the 2022 assembly elections, winning 47 of the 70 seats in the polls and becoming the first party in the 21-year-old state to return to power. Dhami was made chief minister to reward his efforts. Since then the Uttarakhand government has brought in a contentious Uniform Civil Code in the state, amid rising communal tensions, faced criticism for inaction on encroachment on forest land, increasing vulnerability to environmental disasters, and faced protests against paper leaks. No attempts to speak of a ‘nakal jihad’, implying Muslims were responsible for the copying and paper leaks in the state, could quell the anger. But it has been the state government’s actions in the Ankita Bhandari murder case that has been the biggest challenge for Dhami.Bhajan Lal Sharma, RajasthanProtests in several parts of Rajasthan regarding concerns about a new definition for the Aravallis – which experts have said will open up large tracts of the hill range to mining – has posed a new challenge to Rajasthan’s Bhajan Lal Sharma.Like his counterparts in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, Sharma’s appointment in 2023 came as a surprise to many observers.Sharma, who has been the BJP’s state general secretary for four terms, yet maintained a low profile, was made chief minister overlooking Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who the BJP and the RSS had tried to sideline despite popular support and was later forced to make amends with. Sharma has been associated with the RSS’ student wing, the Akhil Bharitya Vidyarthi Parishad, been a sarpanch of the gram panchayat Attari, in Nadbai, Bharatpur and unsuccessfully contested his first assembly election in 2003. In 2023, he contested successfully from Sanganer. The Wire has reported that when his name was announced, he was so little known that a biographical note titled jeevan parichay (life introduction) was doing the rounds listing Sharma’s achievements. Like in Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP crafted the optics of making Chouhan announce Yadav’s name, Raje Scindia too was made to announce Sharma as the chief minister.Mohan Majhi, OdishaLike his counterparts in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, Mohan Majhi’s selection as Odisha’s chief minister followed the same template of a lesser known leader being chosen to helm the government in a state that the BJP won. Majhi, is a four-time MLA from tribal-dominated Keonjhar, and the third person of tribal origin, after Hemanand Biswal and Giridhar Gamang, to take up the reins of the state. The tribal community accounts for nearly 23% of Odisha’s population.Majhi is the first chief minister of the state hailing from northern Odisha and started out as a teacher in one of the RSS-controlled Saraswati Shishu Mandirs. He made his political debut in 1997 by winning the sarpanch election of the Raikala gram panchayat and was elected to the Odisha assembly for the first time in 2000 from the Keonjhar reserved seat. While he won the seat again in 2004, he was defeated in 2009. Majhi contested the Keonjhar seat unsuccessfully in 2014 but won from there in 2019 as well as in the 2024 elections. Seen as a thorough RSS man due to his long association with the organisation, under Majhi ,Odisha has witnessed a wave of communal tensions seen to be unprecedented in the largely peaceful state. Earlier this month, a Christian pastor was allegedly assaulted by Hindutva groups on allegations of forcible conversions. There has been a rise in incidents of cow vigilantism, spate of attacks on Bengali Muslim migrant workers, as well as riots in Cuttack last year.Deliberate centralising strategy and Hindu nationalismAccording to political observers, the glaring governance failures have failed to erode the BJP’s brand equity. The move to appoint lesser known leaders to occupy high offices ensures that state governments can remain proxies of the Modi regime, while real power rests only with the prime minister.Journalist and author Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, whose books include ‘Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times’ and ‘The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right’, said the model of governance Modi followed when he became prime minister was the same as he had established in Gujarat. “While he was chief minister in Gujarat, the chief minister’s office would be running the entire show while the ministers were so only in name and not in terms of the power they held. This meant that they were told to implement decisions which had already been taken. When Modi moved to the centre, it was the prime minister’s office that was running the states where the BJP was in power through an effective remote control to the chief minister’s office. This same model has been used in states where such political nobodies have been made chief ministers, who had no prior political experience and also did not have any experience of governance. This may not have been possible for instance under Shivraj Singh Chouhan when he was Madhya Pradesh chief minister, but after choosing such lesser known leaders, it would have become very easy to run proxies of Modi’s regime,” he said.While governance failures across states are clouding the BJP’s record, the party’s brand equity lies elsewhere.“BJP’s primary interest is winning elections and controlling power. Its election victories are not based on its governance record, in fact, it doesn’t even project it in election campaigns. As a far right party, its brand equity is Hindu nationalism, strongman leadership, and identity politics, and not governance,” said Hasan. “Its support is sustained by polarisation and narrative control, and that would be threatened only if its capacity to mobilise and convert its ideology into electoral majorities begins to weaken.”As a result, according to Mukhopadhyay, the impact of the BJP’s politics in the last three decades of focusing on Muslim appeasement has been such that the need for accountability on daily governance issues has shifted.“It (governance issues) is not affecting the people as much, which is why they continue to win elections because the primary concern has now become that if not anything else, the Muslims who were appeased for so long have been shown their place, which is an argument that the BJP has run as its narrative for 35-40 years and this has now found acceptance.”