Ahmedabad: The BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday stormed into its seventh consecutive term in Gujarat bagging 156 out of 182 seats in the Assembly in election results unparalleled in the state’s history.
The election also saw the Congress facing a wipe-out, getting only 16 seats, even as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a newcomer in the state election arena, won five.
The BJP got 53% of the votes, a significant rise from the 49.05% it got in 2017. The vote share of the Congress fell drastically from 41% in 2017 to 27%, while AAP got 14%. As many as 44 Congress candidates and 128 AAP candidates forfeited their deposits.
The turnout this time was 65%, a sharp drop from 71% in 2017, when the BJP got only 99 seats and the Congress bagged 77. However, the relatively low turnout did not adversely affect the BJP.
The margin of victory came as a surprise even to the BJP and the Congress, though the results were on lines predicted by exit polls.
Polling trends suggested that the BJP could face discomfort as the turnout was lower in the party’s urban strongholds and better in the Congress-dominated tribal belts and rural areas. However, it was clear that those who did vote chose the lotus.
Two instances of the steamroller effect are sufficient to explain why the pitch behaved as it did. Five of the six Muslim candidates of the Congress lost to the BJP, including two sitting legislators. In tribal-dominated South Gujarat, the Congress won only one seat (Anant Patel, Vansda-ST) out of 31. One tribal reserved seat in the same region was picked up by Chaitar Vasava of AAP.
If AAP ate into the Congress party’s tribal votes, it also ripped the traditional Opposition party apart in Saurashtra. AAP’s chief ministerial candidate Isudan Gadhvi lost, but the party won four of its five seats from this region. The Congress was expecting to capitalise on agrarian distress, unemployment, and the Morbi disaster, but AAP played spoilsport.
One result that came as a surprise was BJP’s Kanti Amrutiya winning the Morbi seat. The historic city had witnessed the collapse of a colonial-era pedestrian bridge, an incident in which 141 people died. The BJP has been facing charges of corruption and negligence in the maintenance of the bridge, so much so that the Gujarat High Court moved a suo motu petition and criticised the state authorities.
Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel won with the highest margin of 1.92 lakh votes from Ghatlodia in Ahmedabad. State BJP president CR Paatil has said Mr Patel will take oath as the Chief Minister on Dec 12.
Accepting defeat and taking responsibility for it, the Congress party’s Gujarat in-charge Raghu resigned. “We had made a lot of effort and raised key issues facing the state, but we will introspect what went wrong,” he said.
AAP leader Kishore Desai said this was an unexpected victory. “I don’t believe we couldn’t win a single seat from Surat city,” he said. “I suspect there’s something wrong.”
“This is a victory of the unwavering faith of the people of Gujarat in the BJP’s good governance. Thank you Gujarat!" Chief Minister Patel wrote on Twitter as hundreds of supporters danced and beat drums in celebration at the BJP office in state capital Gandhinagar.
