Gujarat : A 2019 Poll time Case Study Of PM's Home State
BY R.K.MISRA
Gujarat is the home
state of two of the most powerful people in India today. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah.
Both were deeply rooted in state
politics before graduating to centre-stage. Both leveraged their standing
in the state to carve out a national niche for themselves. And both wield power
with elan and an element of ruthlessness to achieve desired results.
Additionally, Shah remains a loyal shadow of Modi and his single most trusted
lieutenant. This constitutes the biggest strength of the BJP in Gujarat
and also it s most flawed weakness.
An outright winner in
2014, BJP bagged all the 26 seats in the state. It has nothing beyond this to
gain in the 2019 elections here. It fights to repeat the feat. The
Congress, on the other hand, has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
The addition of even a single seat constitutes a win and is one
less for it’s principal rival.
Gujarat has been the
crucible for Indian political experiments for long. If Mahatma Gandhi’s famed
civil disobedience movement or Dandi march started from Sabarmati ashram in
Ahmedabad on 12 March 1930,fueled a fire that won independence 17
years later, a student agitation in 1973 lit a fuse that changed the face of
Indian politics years later. The ‘nav-nirman’ agitation grew out of a protest
against 20 per cent increase in mess charges at the government run L.D
Engineering college in Ahmedabad and snowballed into a state-wide youth
rebellion that not only led to the fall of the Chimanbhai Patel led
Congress government in 1974 but kick-started a chain of events that led to
imposition of a National Emergency and subsequently the installation of the
first non-congress government at the Centre in 1977. Ironically this
non-congress government in Delhi was headed by an old Congressmen, Morarji
Desai also a gujarati.
Politics in Gujarat,
as elsewhere in the country, makes for principles of convenience. All the
elements of the opposition which included the Jan Sangh and the PSP had
successfully pooled their manpower to cast their lot with the 1974 student led ‘navnirman’
stir for the ouster of Congress chief minister Chimanbhai Patel alleging largescale
corruption . Sixteen years later, the same entities metamorphosing as the BJP
formed a coalition government in 1990 headed by the very same Chimanbhai Patel
helming the Janata Dal !
National political
developments cast their shadows in Gujarat as well. When the V.P.Singh led
National Front government shored up in Delhi with the support of the BJP
and the left, collapsed, in Gujarat Patel forced out the BJP and later merged
his regional outfit back into the Congress.
It was only after the
1995 Vidhan Sabha elections in Gujarat that the BJP came to power on it’s own
strength with veteran Keshubhai Patel as it’s first chief minister. However the
joy was short-lived as a rebellion by senior leader Shankersinh Vaghela brought
down the Patel government. In the compromise struck by veteran party leader
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Patel was replaced by Suresh Mehta as chief minister and
the Gujarat BJP secretary Narendra Modi was sent out of the state.
The Mehta
government did not last long and was subsequently dismissed and after a stint
of President’s rule, Vaghela came to power heading a regional party and with
Congress support. He too did not last and in the state Assembly elections ,BJP
romped home bagging 117 seats with the Congress a distant 53 in a 182
member House. Patel was replaced by Narendra Modi as chief minister in 2001 and
remained in the saddle up to 2014 when he left to take over as Prime Minister.
Modi till date remains the longest serving chief minister in the history of
Gujarat though the record for the highest seat share stands in the name of
chief minister Madhavsinh Solanki under whom the Congress bagged 149 of
the total 182 seats in the state in the 1985 elections. It is now over thirty
four years since the Congress was last
elected to power in Gujarat !
Modi may be BJPs
biggest strength but he is also its flawed weakness. Modi’s over 13 year rule
in Gujarat saw his complete domination. He was the party and he was the
government.
A cadre based party is a pyramidal structure with power flowing
from the bottom to the top. Modi inverted this pyramid to turn it into a
Congress like structure where the power flows from the top to the bottom. It is
the same ‘Gujarat model’ which has been replicated at the Centre. Now it is the
persona of Modi that rules with the BJP taking a backseat while Amit Shah is
the face that ensures complete Modi control over the party set up.
Gujarat has been suffering
from Modi ‘withdrawal’ symptoms ever since he left for Delhi though he
keeps a hawk eye on the state through Shah and former bureaucrat
K.K.Kailashnathan who is the chief principal secretary to the chief minister.
KK as he is known is a senior IAS officer who retired but has been re-employed.
He was in the CMO under Modi and continues to be Modi’s eyes and ears in
Gujarat.
Nothing grows under
the banyan tree and chief ministers who followed after him have failed to make
a mark. For one, Anandiben Patel who succeeded him as chief minister and
Amit Shah, though close to Modi, are daggers drawn at each other within
the BJP. Surprisingly ,the patidar unrest gained ground under a patidar chief
minister and was finally the cause for her replacement by Vijay Rupani,
who is a Shah camp follower though Nitin Patel who belongs to the Anandiben
camp has been retained as deputy chief minister. Anandiben has already
been moved over to neighbouring Madhya Pradesh as governor to ensure
trouble free functioning for Rupani.
Caste politics still
dominates the electoral matrix. And both the ruling BJP and the opposition
Congress while mouthing platitudes play the caste card shamelessly. The
dominant patidar or patel community has played a major role in bringing the BJP
to power in Gujarat.It now works to bring down the same BJP. Ever since congress chief minister Madhavsinh
Solanki enunciated the KHAM (Kashtriya, harijan, Adivasi, muslim) caste
configuration to create a winning combination to annex power sans the
patidars, this community moved towards the BJP and remained so until
2015.
Patels constitute 14
per cent of the total 63 million population of Gujarat and 21 per cent of
its voter population. As of today the Gujarat BJP chief, Jitu Vaghani is a
patel and so is Gujarat congress chief Paresh Dhanani. The Anandiben Patel
cabinet in Gujarat which was felled by the patidar stir had 7 of its 24
ministers from the community. The previous Vidhan Sabha was made up of 47
patidar legislators in a House of 182.The trend continues more or less on the
same expected lines.
The community’s
dominance notwithstanding, young Hardik Patel who spearheaded the
community’s agitation for reservation in government jobs and educational
institutions caught the imagination of the jobless youth. The statewide
violence after the August 25, 2015 patidar rally in Ahmedabad which left 14
patel youth dead only stoked the fires. Hardik’s arrest on sedition
charges further added to his appeal turning him into a potent force against the
BJP. The results were quick to follow in the panchayat elections in December
the same year. Though the BJP managed to retain control of the six key
municipal corporations-Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Surat, Jamnagar and
Bhavnagar-its majority was considerably whittled down. However it was in the district
and taluka panchayats that it fared very badly. The Congress wrested 23 of the
total 31 district panchayats and 132 of the total 230 taluka panchayats. In
fact it swept the rural and semi-urban areas.
The 2017 Vidhan Sabha
elections in Gujarat further highlighted the loosening grip of the BJP. Amit
Shah who had boasted of bagging 150 of the total 182 seats to set a new record
found that its tally had fallen to 99,the lowest ever since Modi had come to
power in 2001.The Congress, on the other hand, had improved it’s tally to
77 with Rahul Gandhi leading from the front. The results also
brought out the urban-rural divide. While the urban areas remained with
the BJP, the rural areas moved towards the Congress. Of the 55 seats in the
four key cities of Ahmedabad, Vadodara ,Rajkot and Surat, the BJP bagged 44 and
the Congress only 11. In the rurban and rural space, of the total 127 seats the
BJP managed a mere 55 while Congress and its allies picked up 72.
Four demographic
regions make up the state-Saurashtra-Kutch, North Gujarat, Central Gujarat and South
Gujarat.
Saurashtra-Kutch
accounts for 54 legislators. In 2012 BJP had won 35 in 2017 it lost 12 while
Congress which had got 16 in 2012 won 30 five years later. This constituted a
sizeable dent in the saffron bastion and was attributed to farm distress and
patidar and dalit resentment.
The urban-rural divide was again stark in
south Gujarat. The BJP retained 15 of the 16 seat in Surat. In Bharuch ,BJP won
in urban areas bagging three of the five seats. It also retained its hold in
rurban areas of Valsad and Navsari winning seven of the nine seats from these
two districts. The Congress, on the other hand ,did very well in the
rural areas. The BJP, however fared well in Central Gujarat winning 21 of
the 40 seats, getting four more than the Congress party’s 17 in 2012.
In North Gujarat
considered the cradle of the patidar stir, Congress could improve its tally by
only two seats to 23 while the BJP notched up 30 seats.
If a simple
extrapolation of the Vidhan Sabha results of 2017 is done to Lok Sabha seats,
the Congress should be able to mop up 8 of the 26 seats but such simple
calculations do not add up to anything beyond being broadly indicative.
As in the 2017 Vidhan Sabha
elections, so now, there is hardly any indication of Congress breaching BJP
urban bastions. The threat to the BJP is predominantly in the rural areas. And
an analysis of the 2017 results has alerted the BJP to this possibility. No
wonder, it has been at work engineering defections. Just before the 2017 Rajya Sabha
elections,14 legislators had quit the Congress. Five of them were given BJP
tickets but four of them lost while one just managed to scrape through.
Within the last six
months again, Congress legislative ranks have been depleted by five
defections, two of whom were immediately made cabinet ministers. This has been
done with an idea of weaning away caste vote banks to impact the results of the
ensuing Lok Sabha polls in Saurashtra and north Gujarat.
Upbeat after 2017,the
Congress, particularly Rahul Gandhi, has been showing aggressive traits
in seeking to beard the lion in its own den. The Congress recently held a CWC
meeting followed by a public rally in Ahmedabad where Priyanka
Gandhi, the party general secretary for eastern Uttar Pradesh spoke.
For the Congress,
reduced to zero last time, six seats would be a creditable show. And
anything above it, a pole position for Rahul Gandhi in the heart of Modiland. Two
former chief ministers of BJP stock-Suresh Mehta and Shankersinh Vaghela- however,give
the Congress 10 and 12 seats respectively.
For the BJP,though, Gujarat is
Modi’s model state and his template for national development. Any breach in the
bund would be a body blow to the duo and bad for their party’s morale as well !
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