After landslide win, unease in Gujarat BJP over Saurashtra discontent

On the night of December 13, BJP’s Gir Somnath district unit president Mansinh Parmar launched a tirade against “Jaichands (traitor)”, holding them responsible for his narrow defeat by 922 votes in the Somnath seat. Parmar lost to the Congress’s Vimal Chudasama.

“For my entire life, I will never forgive these Jaichands. In due course of time, there will be an audit of this and they will realise what sins they have committed. They have sinned not against me alone, but against 2.65 lakh voters of Veraval. We will never forgive them. Nor is the state leadership of the BJP in any mood to do so this time,” Mansinh said in his address to workers and supporters at Lohana Samaj Boarding in Veraval town. This seat also saw the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate take away a sizable 17.2 per cent of votes.

While he did not call out any names, sources in the BJP said he was pointing fingers at former minister Jasabhai Barad, former BJP MLA Rajsinh Jotva, and Junagadh BJP MP Rajesh Chudasama who is a cousin of Vimal Chudasama. Jasabhai, who was a Congress MLA in 2012, quit to win from the BJP and became a minister in the Anandiben Patel government.

“Due to one Jaichand, this nation suffered slavery for 200 years. Here, the question is not about my defeat, but about the number of years by which this country, the Veraval seat and our village slide back,” said Mansinh as his uncle Govind Parmar, a former vice-chairman of Gujarat State Co-operative Marketing Federation (Gujcomasol), looked on from the dais.

The Somnath Assembly seat is dominated by voters of the Koli community to which both Vimal and Rajesh belong. There are also sizable numbers of Karadiya Rajputs, the community to which the Parmars belong, and Ahirs, from which Jotva hails.

Govind Parmar told the crowd that his nephew had been backstabbed. “They have stabbed us in the back. If you are sons of the brave, come face to face,” he is heard saying in a video. “They took money and we gave them as much money as they demanded. And yet they betrayed. I am sad for this reason.”

Govind further told the gathering that in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he braved angry members of his community to ensure Rajesh Chudasama’s victory. “At the time of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, every leader of my community was opposed to Rajeshbhai. All of you know well that not a single leader was supporting Rajeshbhai. One leader told me not to organise a meeting in the square in Kodinar (a town in Gir Somnath district). But I told him on the phone how dare he say that and asserted that the meeting will happen. We did that meeting there and we helped Rajeshbhai get 80 per cent votes of Karadiya Rajput. The family has imparted these sanskars (values) to Mansinhbhai. So, I request you, don’t forgive such gaddars (traitors),” said Govind, the former MLA from Talala.

The BJP fielded Govind from Talala for four consecutive general elections between 2002 and 2017, as well as in a 2016 bypoll. He could win only the 2002 elections and the 2016 bypoll while suffering defeats at the hands of the Congress’s Bhagwan Barad in 2007 and 2017 and to Bhagwan’s elder brother Jashubhai in 2012. Bhagwan, the sitting Congress MLA from Talala, defected to the BJP just days before the December 1 election and the BJP gave him its ticket for the seat, hurting the prospects of Govind and many other aspirants from the BJP ranks.

BJP leaders in Saurashtra expressed shock at the tirade of the Parmars. “This is quite uncharacteristic of BJP leaders. They are never supposed to launch such attacks from a public platform on fellow party leaders. The words they used are just too strong,” a senior party functionary said, adding, “The behaviour of the uncle-son duo has remained under the lens in the past when the party had fielded someone else from Somnath.”

However, the Parmars are not the only ones talking about betrayal in Saurashtra. Kunvarji Bavaliya, a minister in the new government and the MLA from Jasdan in Rajkot district, said after polling concluded on December 1 that a prominent BJP leader from Jasdan openly campaigned against him and that he would report the matter to BJP’s state leadership. Bavaliya quit the Congress in 2018 as an MLA and joined the BJP. He was given a ministry in the then Vijay Rupani government.

Even in Morbi district, where the BJP won three seats, Kantilal Amrutiya, after his victory from the Morbi Assembly constituency with a record margin, asserted that he would “never be ready for a truce with some” within his party.