Make no mistake, it’s Modi who delivered Gujarat to BJP

Supporters throw flower petals at Narendra Modi | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The PM’s blitzkrieg-like campaign turned into a rescue act, albeit a successful one, and helped wrest the advantage from the opposition.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s tally in Gujarat is nowhere near what it had imagined, but it’s still not a vote against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On the contrary, the ‘Modi vote’ is the primary reason for the BJP holding on to a state where the party’s local leadership had completely lost the plot.

Yet, the BJP will argue that it’s almost touching a 50 per cent vote share, just as the Congress will point to a roughly two per cent rise in its vote share.

But the fact is that neither party offset these gains from each other. Keshubhai Patel’s Gujarat Parivartan Party had secured a 3.6 per cent vote share in 2012 and won two seats. Which is why the ‘Others’ column’ had 13.2 per cent votes in 2012.

At the time of writing this Monday, ‘Others’ account for about 8.5 per cent of the vote, which also includes the NOTA vote. So, more realistically, it’s the Patel vote that went with Keshubhai in 2012, and has this time largely moved in the direction of the Congress, while some have returned to the BJP after the GPP’s merger with it in 2014.

Essentially, the votes polarised towards the big players – the BJP and the Congress – which is also the reason why the Congress tasted some political success. In other words, the anti-BJP vote has gone to the Congress.

Was there a third force in Gujarat to even contest that vote? The truth is there were genuine ‘third forces’ in Hardik Patel, Jignesh Mevani, Alpesh Thakor, and Chhotubhai Vasava of the Bharatiya Tribal Party, but credit must go to the Congress for keeping them within its fold.

This is a big shift from the way Rahul Gandhi has approached these issues in the past.

At one stage, when the UPA was in power, he wanted to dissociate the Congress from Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar, and revive the party as a force in the state. By 2015, he was working with him and Nitish Kumar to stitch up the grand alliance that toppled the BJP.

Gujarat is, perhaps, the first example of a state where the Congress, despite a strong traditional vote base, tied up with anti-BJP forces.

There was criticism for this move within the Congress, but Monday’s results showed the thinking was right – first, it conveyed that the Congress was willing to deal with new voices of local unrest; and second, that it was an inclusive party in practice, not just in talk.

It was this local consolidation of the opposition vote that took the BJP by surprise. In comparison, the BJP state unit wore a divided look, visibly unsettled since Modi and Amit Shah moved to the Centre.

As a result, Gujarat had to be run from Delhi and, thus, local forces filled the vacuum. Eventually, it came down to Modi and Shah to deliver the state.

From being billed as a home run that would sweep the elections, the PM’s blitzkrieg-like campaign turned into a rescue act, albeit a successful one, that helped wrest the advantage from the opposition.

Rahul Gandhi, as the new Congress president, will believe that his strategy of not distracting from local issues despite provocations is a workable model for the future – one that can shore up the confidence of the average Congress worker ahead of the Karnataka elections, except there, the party will have to roll the dice as an incumbent, not a challenger.

On the other side, the Gujarat result does raise the question of BJP’s overdependence on Modi. Along with effective booth management methods, the party will need to take a hard look at its approach towards rebuilding and empowering its traditionally strong state units. For now, however, the Modi narrative has carried the day, yet again, for the BJP.