THE RISE OF A WARHORSE

A SEASONED TRIBAL LEADER, VISHNU DEO SAI PIPS OTHER CONTENDERS TO BECOME CHHATTISGARH CM AS THE BJP TRIES TO BALANCE CASTE EQUATIONS

When the erstwhile united Madhya Pradesh went to the polls in 1990, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had fielded 30-odd youngsters, many of whom had earned their wings in its youth organisation—the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM). The calculated gamble worked. The BJP won 220 of the 320 assembly seats, dislodging the ruling Congress, which had been in power for 10 years. Among the young debutants who emerged victorious were Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Kailash Vijayvar giya, and Raman Singh, who went on to dominate the political landscape in MP and Chhattisgarh in the coming decades.

On December 13, one of the youngest from that ‘batch of 1990’ reached the zenith of his nearly 35-year-long political career. Vishnu Deo Sai, 59, a four-time Raigarh MP who also rose to be a Union minister of state, has now taken oath as the fourth chief minister of Chhattisgarh. It was not as though the BJP had specially groomed Sai for the role, or that his selection was a foregone conclusion. In fact, he was replaced by then Bilaspur MP Arun Sao as state BJP president in August 2022, as part of the party’s plan to take on the Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress government. How then did Sai, who faced an uncertain future just a year ago, bounce back into the reckoning?

After the BJP won a hard-fought and, by most accounts, an unexpected victory in Chhattisgarh, several names came to be in contention for the CM’s post. These included former three-time chief minister Raman Singh, former Union minister Renuka Singh and former Raigarh MP Gomti Sai, besides Arun Sao and Vishnu Deo Sai, all of whom had contested and won the assembly election.