BJP may replicate 'vikas' and 'vishwas' template for 2024

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chemistry with Gujarat coupled with Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s inimitable electoral arithmetic has ensured the BJP a historic win in the western state.

The AAP particularly played a major role in reducing the Congress to 16 seats. In the 2017 elections, the BJP had bagged 99 and the Congress had an impressive 77 seats. There are 182 Assembly seats in Gujarat. To the BJP’s credit, and this is very significant, for the first time since Gujarat became an independent state in 1960, the Congress lost its tribal base completely. There are 27 tribal seats in Gujarat and the BJP bagged 24 of them.

I was travelling to Delhi from Ahmedabad and an air hostess who heard me talking in Gujarati on the phone approached me. She was a tribal from a backward district of Dang. Through a BJP scholarship scheme, she achieved her dream of becoming an air hostess. She was a Christian.

Of course, when most Gujaratis go to vote, governance and development are not the determining factors. It is Hindutva, now rechristened ‘Moditva’.

If the Congress would have included Gujarat in its Bharat Jodo Yatra, the party's defeat would not have been this embarrassing. This was viewed as Rahul Gandhi’s disinterest in Gujarat politics. It damaged the Congress.

Read | The titans of Gujarat

To blame the present Congress for all the debacles would be an injustice. To begin with, Madhavsinh Solanki floated the KHAM theory which ensured 149 of the 182 seats for the Congress in 1985. But this disillusioned the upper class to such extent that they reduced the Congress to 33 seats in 1990 elections and started siding with the BJP.

After Modi became the CM, he brought everyone -- OBCs, Dalits, tribals and others -- under the Hindutva umbrella. The party is reaping rich dividends now.

Hindutva works, and works very ferociously in Gujarat. The ‘Sanskari Rapist’ commentator C K Raolji has won. So has Dr Payal, daughter of a Naroda convict who “managed” bail on medical grounds.

Modi’s cult status can be gauged from the fact that the BJP even won Morbi were 135 people recently died in a bridge collapse. This is because Modi is viewed as a 'bhagwan'.

To capitalise on this, Modi addressed over 90 public meetings in the last seven months. Rahul Gandhi addressed two. The BJP was extremely focused on its campaign and picked up seats they wanted to create records. They did it.

Broad in Central Gujarat and Vyara in South Gujarat were traditional Congress bastions that the party had never lost since the inception of Gujarat. The BJP wrestled both of them.

The AAP has bagged only five seats but it needs to be watched attentively, for it will be the AAP and not the Congress that appears to fight the BJP aggressively.

A takeaway from the Gujarat elections is that 2024 would be about 'vikas' and 'vishwas' (development and faith). This is what has worked in Gujarat, and whatever works in the state gets replicated at the national level by the BJP. We can only hope that Gujarat’s Hindutva model does not get replicated at the national level.

(Deepal Trivedi is a senior journalist and founding editor of Vibes of India)