EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP, are at their best during elections. They are made for each other. Modi is relentless in his campaigning and the BJP backs him up with all its might, coupled with meticulous planning. Every election is fought as if their lives depend on it. This is now so visible in his old playground, Gujarat, where he was chief minister for 12 and a half years. This election, a battle for 182 assembly seats, is close to his heart as he has become synonymous with Gujarati asmita (pride in identity), that ethereal unbeatable quality. It is an election that most pollsters predict the BJP is certain to win. The only question is not whether but by how many more seats it will do so compared to 2017. Also, whether its tally would surpass that of the highest ever of 149 seats, which the Congress led by Madhavsinh Solanki achieved in 1985.

Modi seems to have decided that it is also his asmita at stake in the Gujarat polls. So, he has unleashed a campaign blitzkrieg to secure an emphatic win needed to put wind in the BJP’s sails for the big battle of 2024. For a state election due in December 2022, he started early. In July 2021, he inducted OBC leaders from Gujarat during a rejig of the Union cabinet to woo the community that at 37 per cent forms the largest chunk of the state’s population. Over the past year, he has been all over Gujarat, in his formal capacity as PM and on purely political sojourns, announcing a bonanza that adds up to Rs 79,000 crore. Since September 28, when he came and stayed the longest—all of nine days—he has visited Gujarat every week. The urgency owes partly to the shock the BJP got in the 2017 assembly polls, when the Congress ran them close, and now to the new entrant, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has come in with a bag full of rhetoric and freebie promises. This has set rolling a most remarkable spell of strategic micro-management by Modi, who has unleashed a swarm of cannily plotted political and policy moves that only he could have scripted.

The first step was to ensure that not even an iota of antiincumbency remained to stain the record. In one fell swoop in September 2021, former chief minister Vijay Rupani’s cabinet was sacked overnight, including the lacklustre Rupani himself. He was the second chief minister to go after Anandiben was shifted out in 2016. Even while distributing seats for the polls, the BJP effected a generational shift, with many stalwarts being denied tickets. Step two was to defang the Congress with a spate of well-chosen defections. The BJP has taken in four dozen turncoats from the party in recent years and braved dissidence to field 17 of them this time. That includes Hardik Patel, the stormy petrel of the Patidar agitation of 2015-17, and OBC leader Alpesh Thakor. Regarding caste equations, the BJP made sure through its seat selection that it had covered all the major bases, including the two decisive sections of voters— the OBCs and the Patidars.

Reviving the buzz around development was also crucial. So, all the nostalgia in the party’s slogan of having “built Gujarat together” went hand-in-hand with a spate of hard-nosed policy steps. In October came the Atmanirbhar Gujarat scheme, intended to give an adrenaline shot of capital and power subsidies to MSMEs. A big industry push, even if belated, has been bearing fruit too—in the shape of the Vedanta Foxconn semiconductor plant in Dholera, India’s first bulk drug manufacturing plant inaugurated by Modi in Bharuch in October, and soon after, a Tata Airbus manufacturing unit in Vadodara. Meanwhile, steering his old playfield—the cooperatives—Union home minister Amit Shah helped reformulate policy so that tax liability of Rs 8,000 crore could be waived for 1.5-2 million sugar cultivators in the state. The EWS reservation owes its genesis to the Patidar agitation of 2015 and will help keep the community in good humour. Added to that is the wall-to-wall Hindutva symbolism—the remission of the sentence of the Bilkis Bano rape accused being its ultimate statement. It is a space Modi-Shah can now occupy without any legal taint going back to 2002, after the Supreme Court upheld an SIT clean chit mid-year.

Study the intent and critique of his rivals, and even that seems to reconfirm the Modi aura by default: he is the main target. Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP has changed the dynamics with his on-ground fusillade, though the fruits of his labour cannot be predicted easily. A decent showing will help bolster its ambition to replace the Congress in the state as the prime challenger to the BJP. On the other hand, Congress seems strangely held back by reticence. Its solid vote endured through the Modi years, rising over the five-year blocs. So, the contrast to 2017, when it netted a 41.4 per cent vote share on the back of the Patidar agitation, is quite stark. Even so, Rahul Gandhi, whose Bharat Jodo Yatra was inexplicably plotted in such a way as to avoid poll-bound Gujarat altogether, decided to pause the caravan in Madhya Pradesh and hop over for a couple of rallies. The result is that pollsters are predicting that rather than a bipolar battle that has been the norm, for the first time, there will be a triangular contest between the BJP, the Congress and AAP. The loser appears to be the Congress, with pre-poll predictions revealing that AAP would eat into the party’s sizeable chunk of votes rather than grab the BJP’s share. Such a split in the anti-BJP vote will cement the incumbent’s position.

That is why there is a special buzz to the election this time. Almost a sense of disequilibrium. A departure from the norm. Ahmedabad-based Senior Associate Editor Jumana Shah tracks the fascinating contest from the ground for this week’s cover story, while Deputy Editor Anilesh S. Mahajan taps his sources in the central BJP for insights on the green room. In the past 25 years, Gujarat has settled into an unshakeable unipolarity, with Modi’s persona being brick and mortar for that edifice. But if the BJP’s oft-repeated ambition of topping Solanki’s record must come to pass, it has to break a pattern of decline in seat tally: 127 in 2002, 117 in 2007, 115 in 2012 and 99 in 2017. Counter-intuitively, the Congress went from 51 in 2002 to 59 in 2007, 61 in 2012 and 77 in 2017, its highest tally since 1990. The entry of AAP disturbs that pattern in ways that will be known only on December 8 when the results are announced. How the chips fall then will determine the future of India’s politics and Narendra Modi.