Gujarat: Assembly elections, 2017
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The results, region-wise
(Jai Mrug, co-author of the article, is director of VotersMood Research)
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From: Nalin Mehta and Jai Mrug, Why Gujarat verdict heralds a new BJP 3.0, December 19, 2017: The Times of India
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From: Nalin Mehta and Jai Mrug, Why Gujarat verdict heralds a new BJP 3.0, December 19, 2017: The Times of India
From: Nalin Mehta and Jai Mrug, Why Gujarat verdict heralds a new BJP 3.0, December 19, 2017: The Times of India
HIGHLIGHTS
The verdict disaggregated at a subterranean level was as much about each party’s ground game & last-mile political connectivity between the message and the voter.
BJP 3.0 has managed to retain an urban support base, winning 55 of 73 urban seats.
Modi has delivered Gujarat & the extra premium he brings to BJP has been accentuated even more by this result.
While the bitter political acrimony of the Gujarat campaign - from neech politics to Aurangzeb and from Gabbar Singh Tax to Grand Stupid Idea - seemed to boil the high stakes battle down to issues of identity and economic distress, the verdict disaggregated at a subterranean level was as much about each party's ground game and last-mile political connectivity between the message and the voter. Narendra Modi has no doubt delivered Gujarat again to the BJP for its sixth successive term but the 2017 battle is the closest an electoral fight has been in Gujarat in over four decades.
This time, while Congress, fighting a prestige battle under its newly minted president Rahul Gandhi, adopted a me-too strategy on Hindu issues, the data shows that BJP, which had peaked ideologically in Gujarat, pivoted quickly under the radar to a post-ideological formulation in parts of north Gujarat and a huge swathe through central Gujarat to wrest previously Congress constituencies which tactically offset its losses in the Patidar-dominated areas of Saurashtra.
While Congress reaped the harvest of the Patidar revolt, gaining as many as 18 new Saurashtra seats (and about 30 overall) in a straight belt from Rajula at the southern tip of the peninsula to Dasada in the north, it was hit badly by its failure to retain its traditional constituencies in central Gujarat. While the caste cowboys delivered for Congress in the Hardik Patel/Alpesh Thakore heartland in Mehsana and Patan, their advances set off the making of a new ring of saffron in the adjoining areas of central Gujarat with counter-mobilisation by other castes. Incisive Congress advances into new areas were also undermined by its inability to hang on to many of its 2012 seats and that may well be the story of the election.
Gujarat was the original laboratory of Hindutava and it remains a BJP bastion but the 2017 result ironically is driven less by saffron and more by a welding together of new economic forces and social identities that have come together to create a new social matrix for the party. The only parallel we have for BJP's Gujarat ascendancy in the post-Janata phase is with the Left Front's three-decade long rule in West Bengal. Yet, both models are strikingly different. While the Left was driven by a clear rural votebank across set regions, BJP since the 1990s in Gujarat has had a dynamically evolving geographic imprint and vote base. It has kept wining elections with what we might call smart incumbency.
For example, in 1998, BJP was powered by Saurashtra-Kutch, where it bagged 53 of 58 seats. In 2002, its mandate was driven by gains in central Gujarat when it wrested the Godhra hinterland (52 of 65 seats in and around Godhra and pockets of north Gujarat) which compensated for its losses in Saurashtra that year. In 2007, this central hinterland went back to Congress and BJP pulled in neo-urban constituencies. Data shows that we may now have entered the third of BJP's avatars in Gujarat.
BJP 1.0 in Gujarat was created initially as a caste alliance against Congress's KHAM (Kshtriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) gambit in the 1980s, but in saffron clothing. BJP 2.0 saw Narendra Modi as CM consolidating the party's historic gains with his own special blend of personality politics and assertive Hindutva and turning it into the central pole of Gujarati politics.
BJP 3.0 is different. It has managed to retain an urban support base, winning 55 of 73 urban seats. It has similar support across the industrial corridor, winning 44 of 66 seats along with further and tactical gains in the south (25 seats as opposed to Congress's 10). Its southern push has been driven by upwardly mobile classes of rural tribals and the recently industrialised belts of Vapi, Valsad and Surat which created openings for a new kind of identity politics which BJP has leveraged.
Congress 2.0, driven by a renewed Rahul Gandhi may have fallen short of dethroning BJP but has made significant gains. It has succeeded in capturing the rural narrative, gaining a significant lead over BJP largely in agrarian Saurashtra and pockets of north Gujarat. The fact that the Congress charge was led by its new musketeers from outside the party - while its old satraps like Shakti Sinh Gohil, Arjun Modhwadia and Sidharth Patel lost -- shows that the gains it made with its new freelance leadership would have been far more widespread had it nurtured an organic leadership in the state over the years.
In the end, the bottomline is that Narendra Modi has delivered Gujarat and the extra premium he brings to BJP has been accentuated even more by this result. Along with the Himachal loss, Congress is now in power only in two major Indian states: Karnataka and Punjab. The results seems to continue BJP's hegemony but ironically, the signs in the rural areas of Gujarat may contain the green shots or the possibility of a Congress revival. Rahul Gandhi as Congress president will have to sustain the kind of political configuration he deployed in Gujarat while creating an election machinery on the ground that can match up to BJP's if he is to capitalize on the resentments of incumbency as we head towards 2019.
