Riding on a pro-incumbency vote despite helming the State for 27 long years, the BJP delivered its “best-ever” performance on Thursday by storming back to power in Gujarat for the seventh straight time bagging 156 of the 182 Assembly seats and garnering 52.5 per cent of the votes.
In a stupendous performance in the home State of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP restricted its main challenger, the Congress, to its worst-ever tally of 17 seats as the emerging third force, the AAP, made a major dent into the latter’s vote bank but could win only 5 seats as against its tall claims of forming the Government.
At 27.3 per cent, the vote share of the Congress, which had bagged 149 seats in 1985, is almost half of BJP while the AAP cornered a decent 12.9 per cent. But even put together, their vote share does not surpass that of the BJP’s, reflecting the enormity of the BJP’s landslide win.
The ruling BJP surpassed its record of 127 seats which it won under Modi as Chief Minister in 2002 and achieved the 150-seat target set for 2022 by its chief strategist Amit Shah. Before the BJP, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was the only party to have won seven straight Assembly elections but that it did with a front of coalition parties.
BJP’s Chief Ministerial candidate Bhupendra Patel, who will take oath on December 12, cornered over 80 per cent of the vote share in his Ghatlodia constituency winning the seat by a margin of about 1.92 lakh votes. Modi and Shah will participate in the oath-taking ceremony, said State BJP chief CR Patil. Another big winner was BJP’s Minister of State for Home Harsh Sanghavi, who won the Majura seat in Surat by a margin of over 1.16 lakh votes.
The huge victory of the BJP is electorally significant as bagging over 50 percentage votes is rare in State polls. With the seventh consecutive and emphatic win in Gujarat, the BJP could now showcase it as a curtain raiser to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls which are barely 16 months away.
The BJP has won back the entire Patidar voter base it lost to the Congress in 2017 when the latter won its highest number of seats (77) since 1985. The BJP has also won a majority of the State’s rural, tribal and OBC seats, and has done reasonably well even in Muslim-dominated seats in the State. For its part, the AAP has made good inroads in the Saurashtra region at the cost of the Congress.
The Modi-powered BJP, this time round, not only reversed the trend of falling seats of the BJP since 2012 elections but reduced the Congress to the margin of Gujarat politics with the AAP in the single digits now ‘hoping’ to take its space in the state as it did in the Punjab , though still a far cry.
It would also be not out of the way to note that BJP’s vote share in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls was 37.4 per cent, witnessing an increase from 31.1 in the 2014 general elections.
The pro-incumbency wave in Gujarat swept away the rebel candidates of the BJP (over 40 MLAs denied tickets in 2022) who could not make even a marginal impact on the victory margins of saffron candidates in any part of the state and lost their seats decisively.
Congress turncoats who crossed over to the BJP like Patidar leader Hardik Patel, 29, and OBC leader Alpesh Thakor, 47, won on BJP tickets from Viramgam and Gandhi Nagar seats respectively. Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani, 41, who in 2017 also emerged in prominence along with the Hardik and Thakor, has, however, won his Assembly seat on the Congress ticket from Vadgam seat.
It is a miserable show for the Congress which in 1985 under the leadership of Madhavsinh Solanki had won a record 149 of the total 182 seats in the State Assembly. Its vote percentage was then over 55 per cent. In the last Assembly elections of 2017 itself, the Congress had 77 seats and vote share of 41,5 per cent as against BJP’s 99 seats and 49.1 per cent vote share.
Besides BJP’s visible success in breaking the girdle of anti-incumbency, the entry of AAP in the Assembly polls for the second time in Gujarat with 12.9 per cent vote share bagging five seats has now effectively dented the Congress . The main Opposition party in Gujarat with 16 seats struggled with a little over 27 per cent vote share.
In its first foray in Gujarat Assembly poll AAP had not won a single seat and collected barely 0.034 per cent of vote share which was less than the NOTA (none of the other) votes 0.69 per cent polled in Gujarat in 2017.
The Gujarat Assembly election is lead and carried through by Modi to an unprecedented success as he sought to remind voters in his home State that a vote for BJP would be strengthening his hands at the Centre in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and in turn ensure continuous development of the coming years of ‘Amrit Kaal’. Gujaratis backed Modi with all their might.
