It isn’t often that a state poll takes on the proportions of a national election but that's what the Gujarat state election has swiftly snowballed into. An election that pundits - looking at the packed rallies that the opposition poster boy, the surprisingly cogent Hardik Patel has been drawing - could set the trend for the future, a portent of things to come. So is Gujarat, signed, sealed and delivered? Has Pappu become Papa? Or do we have to wait till the Monday after next, when the second round of polling is held in the state to find out whether the Congress when melded with the youthful energies of Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mewani has dented the hitherto solid saffron bastion?
The doubts eating away at the BJP's innards stem from the fact that nobody but nobody saw even this tiny little hiccup coming. When the Narendra Modi juggernaut first rolled into town, it had every one of us believing it would crush everything in its path and race to victory; that Gujarat was a given. Until the BJP came up against the unlikeliest of challengers - a Rahul Gandhi-led Congress that has lost election after election, in state after state, reducing the party to an abysmal 44 seats in a parliament that in its time, it had dominated like a Colossus.
A shark and a minnow…Chomp, chomp. No contest, right? The popular Prime Minister of the country - not the chief minister of the state who's an all too forgettable non-entity - pitted against a party leader who held no ministerial office, and never has. And yet, the Gujarat story and the no holds barred barbs that have been flying around, wounding and drawing blood, has thrown up the unlikeliest of fights in this state. The lines have blurred. Who's the David, who the Goliath. You can no longer tell how the Congress even became a challenger in this messy mud pit. It certainly wasn't one until the BJP made a huge tactical error. It decided to cut the Congress down to size, make it even more of a shrimp that it already was, going after the Congress behind the scenes tactician, Ahmed Patel.
As Congress legislators and MPs whose votes were critical to Ahmed Patel's re-election, particularly, Shankarsinh Vaghela and his coterie who abandoned ship, and others began to switch sides, wooed by the BJP's master tactician Amit Shah, the Congress, surprisingly, fought back. And surprisingly, won! That's when it dawned on the Congress, which had been out of the game for 22 long years, that maybe, just maybe the mood was changing, the ground was shifting. When the Modi government shot itself in the foot with an overnight demonetization and followed that up with a GST that added to the mercantile distress overlaid by sheer desperation in the rural areas where farmers were left with crops that the middlemen refused to buy, the Congress tapped into an undercurrent of anger against a sitting government, that for the first time was an incumbent, the same party at the state and at the centre. The shoe was suddenly on the other foot.
And then came a Rahul that one hadn't seen before. Dismissed for so long as wet behind the ears, he and his team cobbled together a vote bank that could dip not just into its old Kshatriya base and that of the marginalized Muslims, but the Patidars, who matter as much in South Gujarat where polling was held on Saturday, as it will in North Gujarat where polling is due on December 14, and of course, the Thakurs and OBCs.
The BJP's hold on the Patels has been written about ad nauseum, as has its ability to get the voters into the booths. But that's the other story of Saturday's polling. In this, the first round, the dip in the polling percentage maybe marginal, dropping from 71% to 68%. But what does it mean? That the voter does not want to alter the status quo? Or is it a manifestation of the whispered battle between the VHP chief Pravin Togadia and the PM Modi, and the RSS and the BJP, which has translated into a no show on the blanket door to door mobilization that is otherwise par for the course for the BJP. No-one expects the BJP to be dislodged from its perch. Not even the most savvy election pundits will go that far. The prime minister's electioneering skills are there for everyone to see, his ability to milk sympathy from the Congress leaders' many mis-steps is legion. His standing in Gujarat is unassailable. The CM may be a nobody, but Mr Narendra Modi is their man in Delhi. And given the in-house foot in the mouthers like Mani Shankar Aiyar and Kapil Sibal, the BJP needs no help in making the Congress look bad.
Everyone asks why the prime minister of the country is throwing everything he has into a state poll? Investing all his energies in a state poll. Granted, it is his home state and it was his Gujarat model that saw the BJP bigwigs pick him out from a slew of chief ministers for the post of BJP chief campaigner and prime ministerial candidate.
The fact that the rural voter has traditionally been with the Congress, while the cities remain with the BJP has held the saffronists in good stead. But the Patidars are the ones to watch. They make up 15% of the population and in the seats where the BJP won by a less than 15,000 votes, Patidars hold the key. My BJP insider and number cruncher concedes that the Hardik Patel effect could see the Congress upping its numbers from 46 to 77 and the BJP coming down to a 100. That's not what any BJP leader will say in public. Either way, the Congress is hoping that angry Gujarat will vote them in, while the BJP believes that angry as Gujarat is, it isn't ready to punish them as yet. Anti-incumbency? Hmm! Did you know that the word is a pure, unadulterated Indianism?
