New Delhi: Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel has been ranked as the CM facing least public anger in the quarterly IANS-CVoter tracker mapping anti-incumbency index across all layers of governance in the country. He is closely followed by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Incidentally, among the states going to the polls over the next 12 months or so, most CMs have been ranked rather low on this scale, including the CMs of Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana and Rajasthan.
As per the survey, only 6 per cent of the respondents in Chhattisgarh are angry with Baghel, making it the lowest number across the country.
Conversely, Baghel enjoys the highest pro-incumbency sentiment among all the Chief Ministers, as per the tracker.
In the tracker conducted in the same period last year also, Baghel was among the best performing Chief Ministers, facing the least anger of the electorate.
Kejriwal is second in the list with 8.3 per cent respondents angry with him, followed by Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann (9.7 per cent), Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma (12.2 per cent), and M.K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu (12.6 per cent).
On the bottom of the list is Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot with as many as 35.4 per cent respondents in the state angry with him.
Gehlot is preceded by Karnataka CM Basavaraj Bommai (33.1 per cent), Bihar CM Nitish Kumar (32 per cent), Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar (30.7 per cent) and Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren (29.8 per cent).
While much has been talked about the Delhi model of governance under Kejriwal, not much has been said about how Chattisgarh CM Baghel has been keeping the anti-incumbency sentiments at such low levels, even while maintaining a low profile, which political pundits call “under the radar”.
Baghel briefly made headlines recently when Chhattisgarh surprised all with the lowest unemployment rate in recent months. For more than 36 months, the issue of unemployment has been on top of the mind of a significant number of respondents of the IANS/CVoter trackers across India. In all the recent surveys, unemployment was rated as the most critical issue in the election-bound states.
The IANS/CVoter tracker interviews more than 25,000 respondents every quarter, across all states and UTs. The tracker is run in 11 languages and maps nine layers of anti-incumbency sentiment across central, state and local layers of governance in every state. The current analysis has been done using tracker data from July to September 2022. The margin of error is +/- 3 per cent at national level, and +/- 5 per cent at regional level.
–IANS