BJP banks on Modi factor in Gujarat yet again

THE Gujarat election schedule has been announced days after the Morbi bridge collapse that claimed 135 lives. The Opposition in the BJP-ruled state, however, is not strong enough to channel public outrage and horror over the incident. A sizeable section of the electorate still has a strong emotional connect with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who served as the Gujarat CM from 2001 to 2014. The Opposition is likely to remain a divided lot, with AAP making the contest triangular.

Morbi town is located in Saurashtra and is known for the manufacture of ceramics and watches, the most famous being Ajanta Quartz, owned by the Oreva Group that was responsible for maintaining the bridge. The owners of the group are influential Patel industrialists. They belong to the Patidar community, whose votes were divided in the 2017 Assembly election, when the Congress did well.

Then, an agitation led by Hardik Patel, demanding reservation and OBC status for Patidars, had disrupted the equations in the state. But this time round, there is no such agitation, even as Hardik joined the BJP earlier this year. Some influential Patidar leaders have joined the AAP. Traditionally, the BJP’s support base in the state has been built on this community, which constitutes around 13 per cent of the population, but is in leadership positions in both urban and rural Gujarat. Presumably, with no agitation to provide an impetus, the Congress would be looking at some losses.

Yet, the Congress has always had a respectable vote share in Gujarat — 41.4 per cent in 2017 against the BJP’s 49.1 per cent. But those figures could be altered by a small but potent player, AAP. If its vote share crosses 6 per cent in Gujarat, the AAP would move a step closer towards meeting the Election Commission norms to seek recognition as a national party. According to one of the norms, a party has to get at least 6 per cent of votes in four states: the AAP is currently in power in Delhi and Punjab and got 6.7 per cent of the vote share in Goa. Whatever the result, the young party has created a buzz in Gujarat.

The Congress, however, says this is just media-generated hype that will dissipate before the voting day. It remains to be seen whether Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra will have a bearing on the party’s prospects in Gujarat. Undoubtedly, the party will miss late Ahmed Patel, a towering Congress politician from the state, who was for years the national treasurer of the party and a right-hand man of former president Sonia Gandhi. His expertise in raising resources and managing organisational affairs is no longer available to the party. A good show for the Congress this time would be to retain its vote share and remain the main Opposition party in the state.

As for the BJP, its campaign is firmly focused on Modi. Gujarat has had three BJP chief ministers ever since Modi demitted office in May 2014 after a 13-year reign. But they have been mere placeholders and it is still the PM’s persona that counts in Gujarat.

Even as it’s the most urbanised state in the country, Gujarat still needs to improve education and healthcare facilities in the hinterland; however, these drawbacks are offset by relative prosperity in urban centres, where the BJP traditionally does better than in rural areas. Across the state, there is an identification with the PM’s Gujarati identity and the ruling party’s Hindutva ideology. There is also the belief in the inevitability of a BJP win, which makes even unhappy sections of society settle for the party that is likely to retain power.

Some commentators believe that the Morbi disaster will not change the course of Gujarat’s electoral politics. Still, endemic corruption in the state’s construction sector has been a factor that has had political consequences. After the 2001 Bhuj earthquake and the devastation across Gujarat, outrage against the builder-politician nexus would be the final straw for the embattled regime of the BJP’s the then CM, Keshubhai Patel. In Ahmedabad itself, where swanky buildings had collapsed, there had been speculations that several of them had been built without requisite clearances or permissions, thanks to political patronage.

The RSS leadership had then become convinced that Keshubhai Patel had become a symbol of corruption and ineptitude and if the party persisted with him, it would lose the next election and see the return of the Congress in the state. The Sangh leadership and the BJP, then in power in Delhi under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did not want to risk losing the state. Modi managed to break new ground when he became the first serving sangathan man in the Sangh Parivar to occupy a high office.

The Machchhu river, over which the Morbi bridge collapsed, was also the site of one of the biggest dam tragedies in the world. On August 11, 1979, the Machchhu-2 dam had burst, flooding the countryside and Morbi town. As per estimates, more than 1,800 people were killed. The Morbi dam disaster introduced the people of Gujarat to the social work of the RSS, whose volunteers set up relief camps and worked round the clock. This was the beginning of the RSS’s image makeover and acceptance in Gujarat. Among the RSS members who volunteered for the relief operations was a young Modi.

Till that point, the RSS was not strongly established in Gujarat, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, whose ideological vision was diametrically opposite. The right-wing forces still have the upper hand in Gujarat, both ideologically and electorally.