For AAP, well begun is half done in Gujarat

Led by Delhi Chief Minister and the party’s national convener Arvind Kejriwal, the AAP launched its Gujarat campaign last April, and over the subsequent months, held a spirited campaign, also helped to a large extent by the moribund state of the principal Opposition Congress.

Once a clear trend emerged, Kejriwal issued a video message, saying while the AAP has managed to “breach the BJP’s fort Gujarat” this time, it will conquer it next time.

Here are the five main takeaways from its performance:

1. National party: As mentioned in the beginning, the AAP is set to become the ninth national party in the country besides the BJP, Congress, Trinamool Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, CPI, CPI(M), Bahujan Samaj Party and National People’s Party. The AAP, which has governments in Delhi and Punjab, and some presence in Goa with two MLAs, needed two seats and a little over 6% of the vote share in Gujarat to turn national. The party looks set to end up with five seats and around 12.9% votes. In absolute numbers, while the AAP got around 29,000 votes in 2017, contesting 29 seats, this time, it secured over 40.8 lakh votes, contesting all the 182 sets. In as many as 35 seats, predominantly in the Saurashtra region, the party finished second.

2. Noise vs reality: By all means, the AAP’s crafty campaign involved making a lot of noise, which helped it make its presence felt in the popular discourse despite no real presence on the ground, at least in the initial months. It did so through Kejriwal’s frequent visits, its ‘guarantee cards’, and deputing a large contingent of its Punjab leaders to the western state. To be sure, following its dismal performance in 2017, the party did not withdraw from the state altogether. Its Gujarat in-charge Gulab Singh, who is an MLA in Delhi, camped in Gujarat for months on end, trying to study the traditional networks of patronage controlled by the BJP and the Congress among various castes, traders’ bodies, and farmers’ groups. By the last leg of the campaign, the AAP had emerged as a talking point across the state. But the enormity of the BJP’s victory left very little space for the party beyond making its presence felt. Unlike in Punjab 2017, where the AAP had won 20 seats with a 23.7% vote share to emerge as the main Opposition, the returns in Gujarat are fairly limited.

3. The Surat dampener: The AAP’s performance in the 2021 Surat municipal polls had heralded a new beginning for it in Gujarat. Having won 27 of the 120 seats in the corporation, it had emerged as the main Opposition, relegating the Congress to the margins. Surat is where the AAP also fielded its heavyweight candidates with experience of having led the Patidar quota stir. The faces included the party’s Gujarat president Gopal Italia, general secretary Manoj Sorathiya, Alpesh Kathiriya, who is the convenor of the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS), and Dharmik Malaviya, who heads the Surat unit of the Khodaldham trust. None of them won, finishing behind BJP candidates by huge margins. For instance, in Katargam, Italia lost by 64,627 votes to the BJP’s Vinodbhai Moradiya. The AAP’s inability to build on the gains made in Surat in 2021 can be explained to a large extent by the BJP’s success in winning back the support of the Patidars that it had lost in 2017 against the backdrop of the quota movement and the grievances against the GST. Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge of the Surat campaign towards the end, holding marathon strategy meetings as well as holding roadshows across the trade hub.

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4. Local faces with strong roots: Among the five seats that the AAP looks set to win is Dediapada in Narmada district. That is at least not surprising as AAP candidate Chaitarbhai Damjibhai Vasava used to be a close confidant of Chhotubhai Vasava of the Bharatiya Tribal Party (BTP). Now, retaining the support of the winning MLAs will be a challenge for the AAP.

5. Long haul: The curiosity and interest sparked by the AAP campaign, hinged on its “Delhi model”, was hard to miss. It was clear that for many the AAP fit the bill as a spunky player in the Opposition, as opposed to a largely listless Congress which struggled to keep its flock together in the last five years. The Congress remained dismissive of the AAP, with its leaders repeatedly pointing out that even stalwarts like Keshubhai Patel and Shankersinh Vaghela had failed to make any real dent in the state’s bipolar polity. At the end the Congress lost a large chunk of its traditional support to the AAP, though the party’s silence on “Muslim issues” does not seem to have helped the party make any dent in the BJP’s loyal base. Now, unlike other third-party attempts in Gujarat, its dominance in Delhi and Punjab will supply enough tailwind to the AAP for it to emerge as a stronger pole in the state in the long run.