When Narendra Modi announced that he was going to campaign in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation elections recently, Mukul Wasnik, AICC general secretary in charge of Gujarat, declared that they had won half the battle. The Congress had read Modi’s decision as a panic reaction. Modi’s opponents in the BJP, led by the former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, also got things wrong. They have been gunning for him ever since the BJP suffered reverses in the Lok Sabha elections last year. They realised that a defeat in Ahmedabad would make Modi vulnerable, and adopted a policy of non-cooperation during the elections. As for VHP cadres, they too have long been nursing a grievance against Modi for not rewarding adequately the help they had rendered him in the assembly elections held three years ago. They, too, saw an opportunity in these elections to teach the chief minister a lesson, and decided not to lend a helping hand this time. With no Godhra to sway voters, how could the BJP win in these circumstances? Modi’s goose was cooked, or so went the argument. Modi’s friends had also advised him against putting his prestige on the line, but he knew his survival was at stake and went ahead with his roadshow to reach out to voters. The outcome was that the BJP wrested the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) from the Congress by a margin which even the most optimistic in the BJP hadn’t expected. Modi also succeeded in showing the dissidents and the VHP that he could do without them. He rubbed it in a few weeks later, by helping the BJP wrest most of the district and taluka panchayats from the Congress. This was followed by last week’s victories in the municipal corporations of Surat, Vadodara, Jamnagar, Bhavnagar and Rajkot. The upshot is that today, three years after that bitter post-Godhra election, Modi looks bigger than ever before. His popularity across the state is beyond doubt. His sway over the state unit of the BJP is complete. The dissidents and the VHP don’t know what to do next; in fact, many of them are trying to broker peace with him. As for Congressmen, they are blaming the EVMs, which were used in civic elections for the first time. Yet, some of the more frank among them admit that they can’t fight Modi the way they have been trying to do so far. The Congress must, in fact, do a lot more before it can really challenge Modi. For the last eight months, the party has been run by remote control from Delhi. The last party chief, B.K. Gadhvi, died three months ago. Before he died, he had been bed-ridden for five months. So, in the run-up to the elections, there was no one who could bring cohesion or a defined strategy to party affairs. Every time a problem arose, partymen looked to Delhi. Nothing moved without Ahmed Patel’s approval. But as political adviser to the Congress president, how much time could he possibly spare for Gujarat? There is talk now of Modi considering a mid-term poll, a prospect the Congress would not welcome in the least. Modi may be autocratic and intolerant. His disgraceful conduct as chief minister from the moment Godhra happened, right up to the assembly elections, is well documented. But there can be no denying his influence over voters. He has also, to his credit, cut down wasteful expenditure, downsized the government, improved administrative efficiency, and given a new thrust to some of Keshubhai Patel’s initiatives—e-governance, water management and water harvesting. He also doesn’t hesitate to take unpopular decisions, like pushing through a power tariff hike in spite of opposition from the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh. Besides this, he is also considered honest. One of Modi’s strategies of late has been to reinvent himself as a man of change. He also makes it a point to be associated with new ideas, like the revival of the Sabarmati river and the introduction of CNG, which lends him the image of an innovator. He has been liberally selling dreams of a new prosperity. In Surat, he promises to make Surat another Singapore. When the Narmada water was released in the dry Saraswati river bed, he promises that the parched fields of north Gujarat would soon turn green. When gas was found in a well drilled by the state-owned GSPC in the Krishna-Godavari basin, he went on to proclaim that the find was a mammoth 20 trillion cubic feet, and that it will transform Gujarat. He tells a gathering of farmers in Vijapur that very soon their farms will have oil wells, and every morning tankers would line up outside to collect crude! Reality has a way of catching up with politicians, of course. But at least Modi today is talking of future growth, rather than of narrow, religion driven issues. That, in itself, is a welcome development.
