AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi spoke of his deep faith in Gandhigiri hitting out at the Modi government for “hiding beneath a heap of lies” much against the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi at a mammoth roadshow in the diamond city of Surat on Sunday, the last day of campaigning for the first phase of elections in the state assembly polls.

Eighty-seven constituencies in South Gujarat and Saurashtra are going to the polls in the first phase on Tuesday. In the second phase for which elections will be held on December 16, 95 constituencies of North and Central Gujarat including Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar will go to the polls.

In Gujarat, his first political foray outside Uttar Pradesh, Rahul was not very far from his ancestral home in Bharuch, from where his grandfather Firoze Gandhi hailed.

Rahul evoked a keen response when he spoke of how the Modi government resorted to untruths and believed that a lie, if repeated loudly, and time and again became the solemn truth.

Declining to agree with those who believed that the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi had become redundant, he  said whenever he came across a painful problem, he always found an answer in the values preached by Gandhiji. He added that the current government could not differentiate between truth and lie and could not take Gujarat to a good future.

Rahul questioned the claims of Narendra Modi that Gujarat was the investment destination in India.
He claimed that electricity was being provided only for six hours to the people and that the government has not even released a cent of land to tribals as was being claimed. He alleged that while tall claims had been made about making Gujarat 100 per cent literate by 2008, 30 per cent of the people in the State did not know how to read and write.

Rahul praised the hardworking attributes of the Surtis and claimed that the city’s diamond industry flourished and that he knew of a city in Australia whose prosperity could be attributed solely to the diamond industry of the Surtis. “If Gujarat is developed, it is due to the hard work of the people of the state and not because of the state government,” he claimed. 

Of the five constituencies in Surat city across which the Rahul roadshow traversed, four were won by the BJP in 2002 assembly elections, whereas the Surat (East) constituency was won by Congress candidate .
Manish Gillitwala.

However, Gillitwalla has switched over to the BJP this time round, while suspended BJP MLA and Modi baiter Dhiru Gajera is contesting on a Congress ticket.

Surat is also the stronghold of BJP MP Kashiram Rana who is opposed to Modi. The district has a huge population of Patels who back veteran BJP leader Keshubhai Patel.

The Congress is hoping to turn the tables on the BJP this time. While AICC president Sonia Gandhi has held several meetings across Gujarat during the assembly election campaign setting the tone f
or the aggressive attack on Modi, there appears to be a reluctance of sorts in exposing Rahul in Gujarat.
While Rahul drew huge crowds at all places that he visited and addressed public meetings in Surat, it remains to be seen whether his charisma that had failed in Uttar Pradesh, works in Surat and Gujarat.