Amid BJP’s claims of a wave, AAP tries to create a splash in Gujarat

Ahead of the upcoming Assembly elections, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal appears to be redefining the rules of the game.

Even as the BJP was talking about the Gujarat model, the sudden ouster of the Vijay Rupani government a year ago, the stripping of key portfolios of two ministers in the new Bhupendra Patel government, the agitations by various government employees for grade pay, and the hooch tragedy which claimed 42 lives, have given fodder to the Opposition to take on the government over its governance claims.

Even as Kejriwal promised a Delhi model for Gujarat if AAP won the elections, the Congress has recently begun talking about a ‘Rajasthan model’ in its rallies, having assigned the responsibility of the state elections to Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot in addition to his former health minister and AICC general secretary Raghu Sharma.

Since May, Kejriwal has visited Gujarat at least a dozen times, each time announcing a guarantee and holding a town hall. The AAP has so far announced nine guarantees, and the Congress eight, many of them overlapping — like the 300 units of free electricity and jobs to the unemployed.

Veteran BJP leaders will tell you there is no space for a third party in Gujarat and that AAP would only eat into Congress votes, but there are younger leaders in the party who admit, “even if one MLA of AAP wins, it will be bad for us”.

The fear is not so much for the upcoming Assembly election as it is for the 2024 general elections, given that this is the home state of the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister. It is not so much for AAP’s numbers as much as it is “for the noise it makes”, says a party leader.

Around the time Lieutenant General of Delhi V K Saxena was raising questions on the AAP government’s amended excise policy, Kejriwal was in Gujarat meeting victims of a hooch tragedy in Bhavnagar — the constituency of Education Minister Jitu Vaghani, with whom his deputy Manish Sisodia has had a direct confrontation over the state of schools.

With Goa declaring AAP as a state party in August after it won two seats with a vote share of 6.77 per cent, Kejriwal had proclaimed that if one more state recognised it as a state party, AAP would be a national party. In both Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the party has decided to contest on all seats.

A week ago, Kejriwal had taunted the Centre saying the ED raids on Sisodia would lead to a 4 per cent rise in AAP’s vote share in Gujarat and that if he was arrested, it would take the party’s vote share to 6 per cent.

In the 2017 elections, AAP had contested only 29 seats in Gujarat, losing deposits on all and ending up with a vote share of just 0.10 per cent, which was far below even the NOTA option, which had a vote share of 1.84 per cent. This time, the AAP has already announced candidates for 39 Assembly seats in Gujarat.

Leaders in the Congress and BJP often say that the AAP’s term in Punjab will leave it exposed since governing a full-fledged state — unlike Delhi — is a completely different ball game.

However, if the sheer number of ‘Ek mauko Kejriwal ne (One chance to Kejriwal)’ slogans, brazenly painted on the walls across the city and boldly on the pillars of the Metro Project in Ahmedabad, are anything to go by, or if the number of autos with the same slogan and Kejriwal’s poster smiling from its hoods are an indicator, the AAP has certainly kicked up a storm, at least among the middle class and underprivileged sections of Gujarat.

Kejriwal’s town hall in Bhavnagar had seen jawans of the Gujarat Industrial Security Force (GISF) come in their uniforms and complain about their low pay grades.

The frequent clashes between AAP and BJP workers, especially in Surat, also point to a nervousness in the BJP camp since this the bastion of its leader C R Paatil, who is not only an MP from Surat but the party’s state chief, whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known to trust.

Paatil, who had in an interview to The Indian Express soon after his appointment said that he would resign if the BJP got even one seat less than 182 — the total seats in the Assembly — is now avoiding quoting a victory number. “The army is ready, as are the arms, for the battle…there should be no sympathy,” Paatil said at the rally on September 8m adding that the winning margin should be 50,000 votes on every seat. In the current Assembly, the BJP has 111 seats while the main Opposition Congress has 63.

Having said in 2020 that the party with 1.13 crore workers would not need to “import anyone”, Paatil has since then brought on board young leaders disgruntled with the Congress, including Hardik Patel, Jairajsinh Parmar and Vishwanath Vaghela.

The prospect that these ‘imported’ leaders could be given tickets to contest the elections is causing discomfort among younger leaders in the BJP. To that, a senior state BJP leader says, “Everyone understands that if we have to win the election, and if these leaders make for good candidates, they will get tickets”.

It was in Surat, where, within seven months of Paatil as BJP chief, that the AAP won 27 of 120 seats in the Municipal Corporation in the local body elections held in February 2021, and became the main Opposition. The clashes between the BJP and AAP have only increased since then, the latest being at a Ganesh pandal set up by the AAP, where one of its state secretaries, Manoj Sorathiya, was seriously injured.

On September 3, Kejriwal returned to Surat, where he had announced the AAP’s first guarantee in July, to participate in the Ganesh aarti with Sorathiya.

While the Congress has been calling AAP the “B-team of the BJP” and the AAP has been blaming the Congress as “an ally” of the BJP, Kejriwal’s silence on the release of the convicts in the Bilkis Bano case, and his cries of ‘Bharat mata ki jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ at his public rallies, indicate that he is out to get the Hindu vote.

Like a former Rajya Sabha MP of the BJP said, “If nothing, AAP has managed to keep our cadres alert, which is good.”