Vaghela walks out, again

Gujarat is slated to go to the polls in less than 100 days. Gujarat has provided the board for Narendra Modi to spring onto the national stage and it is very natural that the BJP should want to notch up an impressive victory in order to send out a message that the Prime Minister’s charisma  remains undiminished on his home turf.  The BJP itself has, reportedly, set a benchmark of 150 seats for itself in a House of 182; this is ambitious but understandable. It has jarred the BJP managers all along that though Narendra Modi was able to lead the party to three successive victories, its assembly tally never crossed the Congress best score of 149. Given its triumphal mood, the BJP was expected to engineer an out-of-the-box manoeuvre, so as to re-mulch totally the Gujarat landscape.     

The always ambitious and never satisfied Shankarsinh Vaghela has now provided that spark. The senior Congress leader severed, on Friday, ties with the party, because his claim to be the chief ministerial face was not being conceded. A sense of déjà vu. Once a very important BJP leader, he had walked out of the saffron party because he felt he had been cheated out of his chief ministerial entitlement. His antagonism with Narendra Modi dates back to those days, two decades ago; Vaghela’s ambitions have not changed and nor has the BJP forgiven him for that betrayal. There is no respectable place left for him in his old party. Yet the BJP managers shrewdly worked on Vaghela’s sense of grievance. The Congress, in turn, may feel itself better off without him.

Vaghela’s departure will interrupt the narrative of a “Congress revival” in Gujarat; but it does not translate itself into any definite advantage to the BJP. Unburdened with the Congress yoke, this former Chief Minister can possibly cobble a coalition of the very many discontented constituencies; there is Hardik Patel and his “angry” Patel supporters; the Dalits, and the farmers and other assorted local leaders. He can cut it both ways; he can divide the anti-BJP votes or he can become the  rallying point for all those voices and forces discontented with the BJP after two decades of uninterrupted but mixed rule.