‘Congress seems delusional’

Gujarat BJP in charge says Hardik Patel worked as front for the Congress

NEWDELHI: As the BJP general secretary in charge of Gujarat, Bhupender Yadav was closely involved with each element of the party’s campaign in the state. Seen as one of party president Amit Shah’s closest aides, Yadav spoke to HT’s Prashant

Jha about the final outcome, what worked and what did not, and BJP’s larger challenges:

You set a mission of 150 seats. You won 99. Are you disappointed?

No. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity and performance and party chief’s Amit Shah’s tremendous organisational work has given us a sixth consecutive victory in Gujarat. We have increased our vote share compared to last time. We got almost 50% votes. Converting votes to seats can have its peculiarities. In some seats, you are winning with a margin of 30-40,000 votes; in some seats, you lose by a margin of 35 to 1,000 votes. The conversion is seat-by-seat. When there is a triangular fight, the results change. In some states, with a 50% vote share, you can win 80 percent of the seats. But what our increase in vote share does is create a strong popular base for the party for the future. This is an achievement.

Urban Gujarat is with you; rural Gujarat is where you suffered losses. Why?

If you analyse seats, this is not true. If you see the overall ratio, the urban-rural divide is 40:60. And we have got seats according to that.

But compared to 2012, your rural seats decreased.

But compared to 2012, our vote share increased. You can’t see results from one framework.

Let me ask you this differently. Do you think there is rural distress or discontent ?

I will not call it rural distress, but if in some places, the party has got fewer seats, we will...meet the expectations of people in whatever way we can.

What we heard during our travels was farmers complaining about prices. What will you do about it?

For the first time, we provided MSP (minimum support price) for both cotton and groundnut and bought produce. There could be procedural problems ... But doubling farmer income is in our manifesto and we will keep working on it.

But current trends don’t suggest you can meet this ambition.

When Congress was in power, there was no permission to open dairies in areas except central Gujarat. Under the BJP, there was an increase in dairies in south Gujarat and Saurashtra. Fruit production, vegetable production increased under us. The Narmada dam was completed by us... We will increase all these efforts to meet our objective of doubling farmer

income.

The other issue you confronted was Patidar disaffection. Do you think there was a loss in seats because of that?

We won from areas and districts which were once considered the epicentre of the agitation. People have understood that Hardik (Patel) worked as a frontal organisation, as a shadow of the Congress. If this movement was so big, why did Rahul Gandhi never share the stage with Hardik?

But they were on the same side.

If they were together, if they had promised reservations beyond 50%, why did Rahul Gandhi not announce it?

What will you do to bring back the section of Patidar youth which has moved away from you?

I refuse to accept that any section moved away from us. BJP believes in taking all sections of society together. We do not practice the politics of division and believe in sabka saath, sabka vikaas.

The larger trend we are seeing is of dominant agrarian communities – Patidars in Gujarat, Marathas in Maharashtra, Jats in Haryana – unhappy with BJP. Is this a worry?

This is not true. Even today, BJP has the maximum number of Patidar MLAs. BJP has the most MPs and MLAs from the communities you mentioned.

But you are confronting a Maratha reservation movement, a Jat movement. Your political alliances in these states rested on a combination of other communities.

The anti-Patidar KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) theory was a Congress invention. The non-Jat politics of Haryana was done by Bhajan Lal. BJP has never believed in this kind of divisive politics. BJP has never believed in this kind of divisive politics. This perception has also grown because the party is involved in the sub-categorisation of OBCs. And this appears to be based on the premise that BJP can cultivate the lower OBCs as opposed to dominant communities.

Back to Gujarat, we saw that your performance in the second phase was better than the first phase.

We have got an almost equal number of seats in both states. In the first phase, we got 47 out of 89 seats, and in the second, we have got 52 out of 93 seats.

But compared to 2012, you lost more seats in the first phase and succeeded in retaining your share in the second.

It is an issue for the internal analysis of the party and we will continue to work to expand the party’s base.

Sure, but the question is this. There was a difference in the tone and tenor of the PM’s campaigning as we moved to the second phase. He spoke more aggressively. It was seen as negative. Do you think that made a difference?

BJP never raised these issues. These were issues raised by Congress. They deliberately got Mani Shankar Aiyar to say what he did.

But the PM’s dinner allegation was not backed with evidence. Many who attended it have said that Gujarat was never discussed.

But Congress leaders first denied the dinner happened. Then they said there was a dinner but Gujarat was not discussed.

The other issue in this campaign was youth unemployment. Would you agree that one failure of the Gujarat model has been jobs?

You see the data. Nationally, employment opportunities have increased the most in Gujarat in the last 15 years.

But as you go forward, are the youth getting dissatisfied?

In Gujarat, our vote-share increased by almost two percentage points... In our youth town-hall programmes, from 312 places, there were 1.8 lakh people.

The Congress also saw an increase in its voteshare. What accounts for this in your opinion?

The votes that used to go to independents may have gone to them. Do remember that the difference in vote-share remains 8 percentage points.

But Congress sees this as a moment of resurgence. What do you think?

After 22 years, BJP formed the government in Gujarat again. After five years in power in Himachal, they lost power. If after losing elections in two states, they still consider it an achievement, then they have attained a degree of super-consciousness and have gone beyond worldly problems or are being delusional.