The titans of Gujarat

It was a foregone conclusion after my travels across Gujarat that the BJP would win the assembly election and all that remained to be seen was the margin of victory. I concluded so not because it was a particularly thrilling contest with an edge, but because most voters seemed to believe that it was not in the realm of possibility to defeat the BJP. And so the BJP swept this no-contest contest where voter turn-out dropped by 4 per cent from the last state election even as the ruling party set a new record winning upwards of 150 seats in a House of 182, the biggest mandate ever.

After nearly three decades of rule, the BJP also upped its vote share, while that of the traditional opposition, the Congress, crashed, and that of the new player, the AAP, did not impress. It was BJP all the way in Gujarat, where many people see Prime Minister Narendra Modi as their man in Delhi who symbolises the merger of both sub-national Gujarati pride with the more national Hindutva assertion.

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In one memorable outing in the state, I was encircled by Patidar diamond merchants who said very clearly, that even if all the dropped BJP candidates rebel (and some did) and they are replaced by gadhas (donkeys), the vote will go to them in the name of Modi. These were the same people who had also partly financed the 2017 Patidar agitation that had made the last assembly poll a very close contest, but the fires were now extinguished in the new assertion of loyalty to the BJP. As a middle-class Ahmedabad trader put it, it’s our time to shine, in politics, in business where the top industrialists are Gujarati and even in cricket (star all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja’s wife was a BJP candidate).

I was also informed in this season of regional pride, that another outstanding cricket all-rounder, Hardik Pandya, was born in Surat, and as the captain of Gujarat Titans, a franchise team created just last year, he won the IPL championship this year. What’s more, the Titan’s home ground is the Narendra Modi stadium in Motera, Ahmedabad, which I drove past, which has a seating capacity of 132,000 and is touted as the largest stadium in the world. Briefly, there is a belief in a section of the population of Gujarat that it is their time to shine and dominate politics, business and cricket and make lots of sixes. It’s all subliminally connected to the huge support for PM Modi.

It’s not as if there is no constituency in Gujarat that is dissatisfied and alienated. Yet they, too, would see diminishing returns in voting for opposition forces when they see no chance of a BJP defeat in the state. The victory of the BJP in the tribal pockets of the state, so far tilted towards the Congress, is an example of how the will to succeed, an understanding and grip over the first-past-the-post system, great financial heft, can overcome even a rooted opposition. The Gujarat Congress is a jaded force. Yet Anant Patel a young Adivasi Patel of the Congress who recently led the agitation against a river linking project did win his seat just as in another part of Gujarat, the articulate young Dalit activist/journalist/ politician Jignesh Mevani, also managed to pull through on his seat on a Congress symbol. These are important and radical young voices that managed to buck the BJP Tsunami. The AAP’s frontmen, however, lost after all the buzz created by the party.

The prime minister, on his part, made several forays, rallies and roadshows in the state. He held 27 rallies, spurring some commentary that he was actually nervous about defeat. What the PM was actually concerned about was boredom and ennui, which seeps in when a party acquires a hegemonic status and supporters see the certainty of its victory. The impetus to vote became a tad less, yet more than enough did vote for the PM and, by default, the BJP to give them a historic mandate.

So historic in fact that there seems to be no scope for any sort of punishment through the ballot box. Morbi, where the bridge collapsed on October 30 and over 140 people, many children, lost their lives, did not punish the BJP regime that did not punish the owners of the company tasked with maintaining the bridge. And so the cycle of life, death and politics, continues in Gujarat, a state that remains in complete thrall of its former chief minister, now prime minister of India. It is the state where under Narendra Modi, Moditva was invented that combines the leadership cult with the Hindutva ideology and moves ahead with the help of big capital. That is the Gujarat model that is at play in other parts of India in an age where the BJP dominates political finance and income tax cum enforcement agencies pursue all opposing forces.

But outside of Gujarat, the results have not been so great for the BJP. The party lost the MCD election in Delhi to AAP and the state of Himachal Pradesh to the Congress. What is also noteworthy is that after the defeats, the party seemed ready to “overcome” both mandates. Members of the BJP openly said that they would ensure that the next mayor of Delhi is from their party, which would involve prevailing on councillors belonging to other parties! Knowing that the poaching game is always afoot, the Congress that has lost power in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh due to defections to the BJP, is reportedly planning to take its newly elected Himachal MLAs to another state. Yet even as the BJP has every reason to celebrate the Gujarat win, comes the news that the party is trailing in two of the three high-stakes by-elections in Uttar Pradesh.

The Gujarat chief minister Bhupendra Patel, whom everyone forgot during the campaign, and many people in Gujarat did not recognise by name, meanwhile accepted victory and said that the state has rejected anti-nationals.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.