A man seated in the fourth row in a group photograph of newly-elected MLAs in Madhya Pradesh emerged as the party’s top choice for Chief Minister just minutes later in Madhya Pradesh as Mohan Yadav, a three-time MLA from Ujjian South was declared the party’s choice. The ‘surprise element’, that many an observer flagged as the primary intent behind the BJP leadership’s choice, is anything but that.

BJP insiders say that the decision on Mohan Yadav as the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh was arrived at during deliberations between the party’s top leadership including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president JP Nadda. The legislature party meeting in Bhopal was, at best, a formality for the MLAs to give their stamp of approval to a decision that the leadership had already taken.

Clearly, the decisions by PM Modi and the BJP’s top leadership are guided by the Lok Sabha elections in mind. The focus, says a BJP source, has been to give precedence to caste arithmetic over towering personalities and effect a generational change in the state unit of the party. If the party’s choice of Vishnu Deo Sai in Chhattisgarh, a tribal face, had the BJP’s attempts to expand its hold over Scheduled Tribes in mind, its MP choice has Other Backward Classes (OBCs), the Yadav community in particular, in mind.

One may argue that the BJP has always banked on OBCs while picking chief ministers in Madhya Pradesh. All three chief ministers from the party — Uma Bharti to Babu Lal Gaur and Shivraj Singh Chouhan — were all OBCs. This time though, the BJP has its eyes clearly set on the Yadav voters – a frontier it has failed to breach despite its overwhelming successes in the Hindi belt for a decade.

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Party insiders argue that this decision will reverberate not just in MP, but in other states with a significant Yadav population as well. Several states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have been dominated by two families hailing from the same community. Besides Bihar and UP, other states with a sizable Yadav population include Haryana and Rajasthan.

Even if we leave Haryana and Rajasthan aside, UP, Bihar and MP collectively account for 149 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. UP tops the list with 80 Lok Sabha seats followed by Bihar (40) and MP (29). According to a BJP leader, the MP appointment is not just a signal to Yadavs to support the party but also that they need not bank only on the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal families. The BJP believes that even a section of the Yadav vote swinging in the BJP’s favour could make a serious impact in key states.

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What makes the party’s choice for the Yadav pitch interesting is the choice of state to send the message out to the community. Why Madhya Pradesh, and not Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, states where it is or has been in power on its own or in an alliance? It is because the caste factor plays out very differently in MP as it would in UP or Bihar. For instance, a decision by the BJP to such effect would have irked not just its traditional upper caste voters but also other OBC caste groups in Bihar and UP. In contrast, MP’s response has not been as harsh.

Additionally, the BJP’s CM choices so far also appear to blunt the Opposition’s poll plank of a caste census, and the implied changes in the reservation regime based on the findings of a caste-based survey akin to the one conducted in Bihar. The factor was played up significantly by the Congress in the Hindi heartland states with the hope of yielding major dividends. However, the move failed to make any significant dent in the BJP’s prospects.

Yet, the BJP, known for its rigorous election planning and devising robust strategies, does not want to leave anything to chance. Not only does the appointment of OBCs and tribals to top posts turn the BJP’s traditional image of being an ‘upper caste’ party on its head, it also shows that the party is walking the talk when it comes to OBC representation, a cause the BJP has sought to champion in the second term of the Modi government.