The Gujarat assembly election dates are out. The state faces a triangular fight. The ruling BJP and traditional opponent Congress lock horns while Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the third factor this time, remains a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as the saying goes. The most frequently asked question in Gujarat is, who will AAP gore?
The dates were announced after Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded his present three-day visit, his fourth in just over a month. The stage is set for a tussle that will directly impact the 2024 national polls. If he sweeps Gujarat, Modi strides the national arena for a third stint with the confidence of a winner; if just over the threshold, the lame duck victory will turn into a handicap. “You cannot defeat the BJP in Gujarat with Modi at the helm,” say BJP leaders confidently, adding, “He has the gift of the gab in turning any situation to his advantage.” Both the Congress and the AAP disagree vehemently. The BJP in Gujarat is vulnerable like never before, is their common refrain, though voiced separately.
Be that as it may, the electoral waters in Gujarat have been muddied by the presence of AAP, which has been aggressively foraying into the state, aiming to carve a place for itself through its high-profile campaigning. “We are playing to win, have little to lose and much to gain, whatever the outcome,” point out their state leaders.
On the other hand, the Congress has adopted an uncharacteristic low profile concentrating on door-to-door campaigning, building on its strength in the rural areas and voter groups which have been worst affected by the economic downturn, including farmers, jobless youth and the small-scale entrepreneur. “We are targeting 125 winnable ones of the total 182 seats though we shall contest many more,” says the chief party spokesperson.
BJP has ruled Gujarat for almost 25 years and Modi for more than half of it. He is the longest-serving chief minister in the state’s history but still short of former Congress Chief Minister Madhavsinh Solanki’s unbeaten record of winning 149 seats out of the total 182 in 1985. Modi’s high point was 127 seats to the Congress’ 51 in the 2002 elections, held under the shadow of the Godhra train carnage and the statewide communal riots that left a thousand dead. After that, it has been a steady downhill journey to 117 in 2007, 115 in 2012 and 99 in 2017.
The Congress has made small, sure-footed gains from 51 seats in 2002 to 59 in 2007, 61 in 2012 and 77 in 2017. Dr Manish Doshi, the party spokesperson, candidly admits that 2002 was the lowest point for his party due to the resort to blatant communal polarisation, but they still managed 51 seats, and there has been no looking back thereafter. “Wait for some surprises this time,” he adds.
Doshi relies on Gujarat’s electoral history to bolster his claim that the ensuing election will be a straight contest between the two traditional rivals. Influential political leaders of their time had floated regional parties in Gujarat, which failed to garner electoral approval.
These included Chimanbhai Patel, who quit the Congress following his ouster in the face of the Navnirman students agitation and formed the Kisan Mazdoor Lok Paksha, Shankersinh Vaghela, who walked out of the BJP to form the Rashtriya Janata Party, and veteran BJP leader Keshubhai Patel, who formed the Gujarat Parivartan Party. All came a cropper.
AAP’s entry into Gujarat was initially music to BJP’s ears as it saw a split of opposition votes affecting the Congress and working to their advantage. Kejriwal’s set-up was also more keyed into Himachal Pradesh after its Punjab victory and planned to use the ensuing elections in Gujarat as an opportunity for organisation-building and no more. With Delhi and Punjab in the bag, Himachal would be a natural priority to enable it to go for Haryana in 2024, thus making for a contiguous land-mass political domain.
However, the Punjab victory also brought AAP into the crosshairs of the BJP, which came alive to its plans, and its Himachal in-charge, Satyendar Jain, ended up behind bars after Enforcement Directorate scrutiny. In a change of strategy, AAP, which was hitherto targeting only the Congress-held rural strongholds in Gujarat, then decided to beard the BJP in its den with an all-out assault. In June this year, AAP revamped its state unit, appointed 850 office-bearers, enrolled 30,000 members, and publicly announced its intent to take on the ruling BJP with Kejriwal leading from the front.
AAP’s proven success has been only in the urban areas, considered the BJP’s citadel. In the Surat Municipal Corporation elections last year, the BJP won 93 and AAP 27 seats in a 120-member house while the Congress was wiped out. In the subsequent Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation elections, the BJP bagged 41 of the total 44 seats, with the Congress down to two seats and AAP taking the remaining solitary seat. However, the combined votes of the Congress and AAP were higher than the BJP’s. All the eight municipal corporations of Gujarat—Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Junagadh, Jamnagar, Bhavnagar and Gandhinagar are BJP-controlled. Though Modi sought to tackle anti-incumbency by replacing chief minister Vijay Rupani and his entire cabinet, which was under fire for laxity in dealing with Covid, there are indications that this group guillotine has not worked. The recent Morbi bridge collapse, with over 150 fatalities, including many children, has brought the focus back on inept governance and corruption, adding to the ruling party’s woes.
If AAP is now intently targeting the urban bastions of the BJP with a high-profile campaign, the Congress is skimming the ground, and its focus is more in the rural and tribal areas. In the 2017 Vidhan
Sabha elections, of the 55 urban constituencies in Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot and Surat, the BJP bagged 44 and the Congress 11. Of the 127 rural and semi-urban constituencies, the Congress and allies won 68 and the BJP 55. It was no wonder that the prime minister, in one of his public rallies, warned party cadres that the surface sloth of the Congress hid an active rural, grassroots contact programme. He also said that for this election, the Congress had outsourced the work of heaping calumny to the AAP, thereby seeking to equate the two as working in tandem. Are they, even if informally?
R K MISRA
Senior journalist and commentator
(rkm234@gmail.com)