New Delhi: After Uttar Pradesh, the Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi will lead the campaign for the Gujarat Assembly polls slated for next year. Hit by strong anti-incumbency, Patidar and Dalit agitations, a worried BJP government in the state is also contemplating going in for an early elections along with Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Chief Minister, Mr Vijay Rupani has reportedly asked the party to be “battle-ready.”
With AAP supremo, Arvind Kejriwal rapidly making inroads into the saffron citadel, the BJP is once again leaning on Mr Modi. Since August, Mr Modi has been regularly visiting Gujarat. After Mr Modi shifted base to Delhi to take charge at the Centre, the BJP has been struggling in his home state.
The brewing resentment of the Patidars, which had been kept under check by Mr Modi’s deft handling, is out in the open. And after attack on the Dalits in Una, the ruling BJP finds itself cornered from all sides.
Sources said that though Mr Rupani has been handpicked by the BJP high command, he was “not being able to control the situation” and during the 2017 Assembly polls, the state could possibly slip out of the BJP’s grip. The state unit and even the state government is now looking upto Mr Modi to change the scenario.
Besides Mr Kejriwal, the leader of the Patidar agitation, Hardik Patel has also invited Nitish Kumar to Gujarat to support the demand of reservation for Patidar community.
The Prime Minister started his Gujarat visit from August and till date he has visited Gujarat at least five times. To pacify the influential Patidar community, Mr Modi visited Sarangpur in North Gujarat. Then again he addressed a rally at the nerve centre of the Patel agitation at Dhrol of Jamnagar in North Gujarat.
Then he inaugurated the Saurashtra Narmada Avataran.
In September, he was in Ahmedabad to seek his mother’s blessings for his 66th birthday. To win over the tribals, Mr Modi distributed kits to the physically challenged in the tribal district of Navsari in South Gujarat. On Saturday, he inaugurated the international airport at Vadodara.
His regular trips to Gujarat has made it evident that a concerned BJP is depending on the Prime Minister as he continues to remain the party’s star campaigner and main vote catcher. Speaking to this newspaper, a senior BJP leader said, “We not only need him in UP to lead the campaign, we need him in Gujarat too.”
