The international media may not have noticed it, but the BJP recently suffered an embarrassing defeat on its home turf, Prime Minister Modi’s Gujarat.
Not long ago, the BJP suffered a crushing defeat at the state assembly elections in Bihar, being soundly routed by the joint forces of Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the Congress. And things did not play out too well at the recently concluded local elections in Gujarat either.
Gujarat is Prime Minister Modi’s home turf, and it is widely believed that Modi’s ability to project his so-called “Gujarat model” as a development model for the whole of India was instrumental in securing him, and the BJP, a landslide victory in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
The BJP has been in power in Gujarat for over 20 years, interrupted only during a brief period in the late 1990s when the state government was led by the Rashtriya Janata Party, which, however, was formed by defectors from the BJP. When Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, Anandiben Patel took over as chief minister.
In the recent local elections, however, the BJP suffered a significant decline in popular support, although they performed well enough in the cities where they won all six municipal councils, and a solid majority of the 56 town councils.
But in the villages, the Congress emerged as the big winner, bagging 24 out of 31 district panchayats (the BJP won six against 30 in 2010) and 134 out of 230 Taluka panchayats (the BJP won 67 against 150 in 2010). And the vote swing was significant. In 2014, the BJP had won more than 59% of the vote.
This time they hovered around 44%. The Congress won around 52%. So if the BJP is growing increasingly concerned with the upcoming 2017 state elections, they have good reason for doing so as Gujarat is probably the last place where the BJP would want to see itself defeated, even if Modi has now moved on to Delhi.
They may find some comfort in the fact that the logic of a local election is not necessarily the same as the logic of a state election, and that much can happen in politics in one and a half years. At first glance it would appear that the result confirms what Modi’s critics have long argued: The BJP’s development model in Gujarat favours the urban middle class and the corporate sector, while the countryside foots the bill.
That is why the BJP is still strong in urban areas while they have lost their grip on the villages. Whether there is any truth in this assumption will probably have to await further analysis, but it is not unlikely to have some truth value. What has surely made an important difference, however, is that many of the state’s Patidar have turned their backs on the BJP.
The Patidar earlier this year rallied strongly behind a demand for inclusion in the state’s OBC list -- in order to avail of the benefits associated with reservations for OBCs -- but Chief Minister Anandiben Patel refused. Hardik Patel, one of several now imprisoned leaders of the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samit who fronted the demand for OBC status, responded by declaring that “the lotus will not bloom” in Gujarat in 2017, unless the demands of the Patidar were granted. Apparently, the lotus has already begun to fade ahead of time.
The Congress Party of course welcomes the good result after more than 15 years of successive defeats in Gujarat.
But here too, there is cause for concern as, insofar, the outcome can hardly be interpreted as an unconditional declaration of support for the Congress Party from significantly more voters than before.
That Patidar, in several places and in large numbers, voted for the Congress party this time can easily turn out to be a one-off event.
And while there has been much talk that the time is now ripe for the Congress to reinvent its successful “Kham” formula (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, and Muslim) which worked so well in the 1980s, there is little sign of success yet.
The journey towards the 2017 state elections may turn out to be bumpy and angst-ridden for both parties in Gujarat’s relatively stable two-party system -- and for Prime Minister Modi.
