Statistically speaking, the BJP has fared better this time by winning 15 out of Gujarat’s 26 Lok Sabha seats compared to 14 won during the 2004 elections. The Congress has actually showed a slight dip in numbers by winning 11 seats compared to 12 in the last elections.
The BJP wrested five seats from the Congress while retaining six. The Congress snatched four seats from the BJP and retained five others. The remaining seats won by both parties are newly created, post-delimitation.
But such a reading would be far too simplistic. The story behind the numbers is one of ambitions and aspirations, claims and counter-claims.
Considering that they were hoping to win up to 20 Lok Sabha seats, the ruling BJP has not fared that well in a state that has been considered a bastion of the saffron party and which played electoral host to a prime ministerial candidate in Lal Krishna Advani even while a section of the party’s national leadership projected Chief Minister Narendra Modi as future prime minister material.
But this decade’s electoral saga in Gujarat has not been about party politics alone. It has mostly been scripted by one man, and that is Narendra Damodardas Modi. His popularity, and his electoral strategies have largely decided the fate of the state BJP.
On the other hand, the electoral fortunes of the Congress have been determined more by projections of Modi’s unpopularity and his miscalculations in the absence of that party’s state-level stars.
This year’s electoral results seem to reflect that Modi’s ‘magic’ did not work to plan or to his party’s calculations. The parliamentary election results appear to mark a dent in his popularity coming as they are barely a year-and-a-half after his second successive thumping victory in the 2007 assembly elections.
Modi had a say in choosing most of the party’s 26 candidates. In the process, as many as 10 of the party’s previous 14 sitting candidates were not fielded partly due to delimitation but mostly due to Modi’s opposition. The fact that Modi may have badly miscalculated appears evident since eight of Modi’s handpicked candidates lost — something that will be the subject of much analysis within the party’s rank and file.
In five out of seven of these eight constituencies, the sitting MP was from the BJP. The defeat in these five constituencies reflects adversely on Modi’s choice and on his decision-making. The eighth, Bardoli, was a newly created constituency.
On the other hand, the two candidates who were not Modi’s choice, i.e. Rajendrasinh Rana (Bhavnagar) and Harin Pathak (Ahmedabad-East), both sitting MPs, won with comfortable margins. In fact, all four sitting MPs who were fielded, emerged victorious.
Only one BJP sitting MLA was able to win the parliamentary elections compared to four Congress sitting MLA’s. All the three Congress defectors that had been fielded by the BJP in Patan, Surendranagar and Dahod were also defeated.
Interestingly, on the other hand, Somabhai Patel, the BJP defector to the Congress, who had supported the UPA government on the nuclear deal against the party, was re-elected from Surendranagar on the Congress ticket. Clearly, both Modi’s personal belief and his party’s confidence that he could get anyone elected single-handedly have been badly bruised in these parliamentary elections.
A nasty shock for the BJP has been its poor performance in the Saurashtra and Kutch region where the Congress increased its tally from a solitary seat to four. In fact both parties polled a similar percentage of votes i.e, 43.09 percent (Congress) and 43.84 percent (BJP).
Much to the BJP’s dismay, it lost two traditional strongholds, Rajkot and Porbandar, after two long decades along with Surendranagar. While delimitation has been attributed as one of the causes, the major factor has been the mobilisation of the Patels away from the BJP, especially in Rajkot, Porbandar and Jamnagar.
The elections also marked the BJP’s first humiliation if not actual defeat at the hands of the Mahagujarat Janata Party (MJP), a breakaway faction of the state BJP, which contested parliamentary elections in the state for the first time.
The MJP’s president, Gordhan Zadafia, who fought from Bhavnagar (also located in Saurashtra), managed to secure 1.5 lakh votes, which resulted in reducing the BJP candidate’s victory margin to just under 6,000.
Yet another significant sidelight from Saurashtra is that Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace, Porbandar, has the dubious distinction of electing a candidate (Vitthal Radardiya) with the maximum number of criminal cases (16) against him in the state. This was one of the three constituencies that Sonia Gandhi visited during her one-day tour of the state.
To the surprise of many political observers, the state’s three main diamond cities voted for the BJP despite many incidents of suicide by diamond workers following large-scale retrenchment and closure of diamond units. While the BJP was able to retain the seats of Surat and Bhavnagar, it was also able to wrest Amreli from the Congress.
But just how close was the electoral contest, thereby indicating the tough fight that the BJP faced this time, is evident from an analysis of some of the victory and defeat margins. In two constituencies each, the BJP and the Congress won with narrow margins ranging between just 800 to 6,000 votes.
While in Kheda and Surendranagar the Congress won with a margin of 846 and 4,837 votes respectively, in Panchmahal and Bhavnagar the BJP won with a margin of 2,095 and 5,912 votes respectively. Then again, in six other constituencies, the BJP and the Congress won four and two seats, respectively, with margins ranging between 17,000 and 27,000 votes.
However, Advani’s cherished desire of winning with a huge margin like last time was not to be. He won with a margin of 1.22 lakh compared to 2.17 lakh in 2004, partly due to an overall reduction of votes due to delimitation and largely due to mobilisation of the Patel vote against the BJP. Interestingly, Advani’s Congress opponent did better in Sanand where Tata’s Nano car project has been relocated.
Advani’s victory margin is the lowest so far compared to his own and Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s earlier victory from the Gandhinagar constituency. Also, his victory margin is lower than that of some of his party colleagues in the state, for example, Balkrishna Khanderav Shukla from Vadodara who won with a margin of 1.36 lakh votes.
Gujarat’s glamour candidate Mallika Sarabhai, who was the most sought after candidate by the media in the state, lost her deposit while contesting from Gandhinagar.
The Congress party’s most significant shock was the defeat of two of its three union ministers — Textile minister Shankarsinh Vagela from Panchmahal of which Godhra is a part, by just 2,095 votes, and Railway minister of state Naran Rathwa from Chhota Udepur by 27,000 votes. The third Congress minister at the Centre, Dinsha Patel, managed to win but by a narrow margin of just 846 votes from Kheda.
In Modi’s Gujarat, it was the Chief Minister who was the sole star campaigner. But evidently, his 80 odd rallies in the state were not enough to swing the tide. Advani, the state’s only non-Gujarati speaking candidate, confined his campaigning to his constituency and that too during the last three days of campaigning.
Modi clearly overshadowed all BJP leaders in his state. The Congress largely managed locally with few star campaigners. Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi made only one visit each, the latter on the last day of campaigning.
Elsewhere in the country, Modi addressed over 300 rallies, reportedly more than even Advani did. The fact that the BJP fared badly in almost every state that Modi campaigned in, is perhaps a reflection of the magic gone awry — something that might be the subject of introspection within the party.
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