Modi will be leading the BJP’s campaign in nine states including the heartland states of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and the southern states of Telangana and Karnataka. He will also set the global political and economic governance agenda as India has assumed the presidency of G-20.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have a busy schedule in 2023 which will see him not only campaigning for elections in some crucial states but also setting the G20 agenda. He will be leading the BJP’s campaign in nine states including the heartland states of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and the southern states of Telangana and Karnataka. He will also set the global political and economic governance agenda as India has assumed the presidency of G-20, an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 countries cutting across continents and the European Union.
The group, which also invites non-member countries including Bangladesh, Singapore, Spain and Nigeria, besides international organizations such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, the World Bank and the IMF, represents around 85% of the world’s GDP. This is a unique opportunity for India not only to shape the international policy discourse but also align its national priorities with its global aspirations.
The elections to the nine states are crucial for the BJP as the results will give us an inkling of the party’s hold over the masses ahead of the big battle in 2024. Among the nine states that go to the polls this year Congress is in power in just two — Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Though the recent victory in Himachal Pradesh assembly elections has come as a morale booster for the party, challenging the BJP will still be an uphill task for the Congress.
In Rajasthan, the biggest state where the Congress is in power, the party is plagued by internecine quarrels with chief minister AshokGehlot and Sachin Pilot, the second most important Congress leader of the state, not seeing eye to eye on most of the issues. Though the BJP is also grappling with factionalism in Rajasthan with former chief minister Vasundhara Raje and Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat engaged in a war for supremacy, the problem in the Congress is more serious.
The Congress faces a similar problem in Chhattisgarh but the party government seems to have established a stronghold on the state with its welfare schemes. However, BJP, which has already made some important changes in the state leadership, will try its best to wrest power from the Congress. Madhya Pradesh is one of the two states (other being Karnataka) where the BJP currently has a government but had suffered a setback in the previous assembly elections. In 2018, the Congress surprisingly ousted the BJP from power and Kamal Nath became the CM. However, the victory proved short-lived as 22 MLAs of the Congress, including senior leader JyotiradityaScindia, resigned from the party and joined the BJP. After this, BJP’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan returned as CM on March 23, 2020.
In Telangana aiming to go national by renaming the Telangana Rashtra Samithi as the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao will be looking for a hat-trick of victories. The state is likely to witness a keen battle between BRS and the BJP with top saffron leaders such as Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president JP Nadda already having made several visits to the state during the past one year. The results of these states will be crucial for the BJP though the party will try equally hard to retain its hold on the North-eastern states with Prime Minister Narendra Modi already having sounded the poll bugle in the region during his recent visits to Meghalaya and Tripura where he inaugurated a slew of projects worth Rs 6,800 crore.
The other test for Prime Minister Modi will be on the international front with India setting the global governance agenda as the leader of G20. India began its year-long presidency of the G20 in December taking over from Indonesia. During its term, India will hold more than 200 meetings across some 50 cities involving ministers, officials and civil society, leading up to a summit meeting in New Delhi in September this year. The summit will be attended by around 30 heads of state and governments from G20 members and invited countries.Modi set the tone for India’s presidency of this prestigious international forum by calling for international cooperation on global issues including terrorism, climate change and pandemics.
