Assembly election: What swung the vote in Gujarat

When Amit Shah first began assisting the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) general secretary (organisation) in the state, Narendra Modi, in elections in Gujarat in 1987, it was a time of the dominance of the Congress and Janata Dal.

Modi told him — as Shah recounted in a book chapter to mark Modi’s 20 years in government published earlier this year — that the way to expand was to target leaders who lost elections for the sarpanch seats across the state. The logic was simple. The runner-up too would have a 30-40% vote share in the local context. “This was not enough to win, but still estimable. Modi asked us to approach all such persons and invite them into the BJP… If the match worked, it added a sizeable number of voters, at the village level, to our existing core. It also gave us a notable micro-level leader of some influence.” This, Shah suggested, was how Modi built the party organisation in Gujarat.

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Thirty-five years later, as Modi’s charisma and Shah’s management have helped the BJP win the highest ever seat tally for a party in the state’s electoral history, the anecdote offers an insight into how the party was built in the state brick by brick over decades.

The erosion in the Congress’s strength and social coalition, the collapse of the Janata Dal, the Hindutva-laced political energy of the early 1990s, and the formidable work of the trio of Keshubhai Patel, Shankarsinh Vaghela and Modi gave the BJP its first outright election win in 1995. Internal fractures created the room for Modi to take over as the chief minister in 2001. Communal polarisation and post-Bhuj rehabilitation work gave the party its biggest victory till that point. And the mix of development of Hindutva, and Modi’s every increasing political stature, then enabled successive wins for the party in 2007 and 2012.

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But the scale of Thursday’s victory is unprecedented. To appreciate it, the context between 2014 and 2021 is important, for numbers often hide more than they reveal.

The crises

Since 2014, the BJP in Gujarat has actually been in permanent damage control mode. This has taken three forms.

One, there has been a clear leadership crisis for the party in the state. After 12 years at the helm, Modi moved to Delhi, appointing Anandiben Patel as the chief minister. While anyone would have struggled to match the political stature of Modi, Patel began with a disadvantage — she also shared an uncomfortable relationship with Shah. In the following year, as the Patidar agitation shook the BJP’s foundations in the state, the national leadership replaced Patel with Vijay Rupani from Rajkot. In the 2017 assembly elections, Rupani’s weaknesses were apparent and it was Modi’s emotional connect with the state — just like in 2022 — that helped the BJP secure a sixth electoral win. But Rupani’s leadership deficits once again became apparent during the pandemic, and eventually the BJP had to not just replace him but the entire cabinet. The leadership picked Bhupendra Patel, a low-key local leader, as CM. For a party that prides itself on providing strong and stable leadership, having three CMs in eight years is as close to an acknowledgment of weaknesses as one can get.

The second is at the level of the administration. Modi had a firm grasp over the entire administrative apparatus, innovated with policy approaches, maintained a mass connect throughout his tenure, and knew how to link policy with political benefit. His successors have been unable to display any of those skills. 2022 was also the first election after the mismanagement of the pandemic, where all states struggled but Gujarat was seen, in patches, struggling more than others.

And the third is at the level of social engineering. The BJP, under Modi, was able to weave together a multi-caste, multi-class, urban-rural coalition of unprecedented strength. This began cracking with the Patidar agitation, with discontent among smaller other backward classes groups, and acute rural discontent in 2017.

All of this was combined with one intangible factor— the generational change in Gujarat. Voters in the 18-25 age bracket have never seen a party besides BJP rule the state. For them, the BJP is the natural party of governance but also the only party they hold responsible for the ills in Gujarat’s management. They have no memory of the past — and don’t underestimate the role of the politics of memory, for the BJP contrasts its own rule with that of the alleged Congress politics of corruption, crime and “minority appeasement” to build its appeal. All of these factors mean that BJP’s dominance has actually been far more fragile than assumed.

The victory

Despite this, the BJP has scored its most impressive win so far in the state. How did it happen?

The first — and most important reason — is simple. Narendra Modi is not just the most powerful BJP leader in the party’s history and the most powerful Indian Prime Minister in decades. He is the tallest Gujarati mass leader in post-Independent India by far. Sardar Patel died in 1950, before India’s first elections; indeed the state wasn’t even an independent entity then. Morarji Desai was a pillar of national politics and the first Gujarati to become PM, but didn’t come close to Modi’s mass popularity. There has never been a leader who served Gujarat, or any state for that matter, as CM for 12 years and then served as PM for eight years.

In both 2017 and 2022, Gujarati voters, attached to their own version of sub national pride, did not want to let down this Gujarati leader who was the PM. Remember, the PM made this his own election; he put his personal prestige at stake; he did over 30 rallies and 2 historic roadshows. A defeat for him in Gujarat, voters in the state know, could weaken him nationally; a victory for him in Gujarat, voters in the state know, means that even though he can’t personally micromanage the administration, the state’s interests will not be hurt and many stakeholders will have a line to the national leadership directly or indirectly. But more than any instrumental calculation, the emotional pull of Modi in the polling booth is hard to comprehend.

Translating this emotional pull into votes was a direct outcome of Amit Shah’s management and political skills — the second ingredient of the BJP’s victory. The young man who learnt party building from Modi in 1987 has, by now, despite sporadic setbacks, mastered the art of what an election entails.

In this election, Shah made Gujarat his base. He studied which seats were vulnerable and which sitting legislators had to be replaced; eventually 42 were changed, a tactic that the BJP often uses to ward off local anti-incumbency. He decided where to invest resources and which leader to send where. He plotted Modi’s rallies and roadshows with the objective of ensuring maximum impact. He devised ways to benefit from the fragmentation in the opposition votes in South Gujarat and Saurashtra. He ensured that the party structure, down to the level of the booth and the panna pramukh, did not let complacence take over and mobilised voters on polling day. And he touched on all campaign issues, including introducing the staple BJP technique of communal polarisation, in his own gruelling schedule. And Shah played on the politics of memory, constantly providing his own version of what a pre-Modi Gujarat looked like to voters who have grown up in the Modi era.

Unlike in 2017, the third factor enabling the BJP’s success at this scale has been the collapse of social or caste-based movements, the astonishing weakening of the Congress political architecture and the entry of a third player in an otherwise bipolar polity. Make no mistake. The BJP would have won this election in any case. But through policy — reservations for economically weaker sections — and politics — the appointment of a Patel CM and the co-option of leaders such as Hardik Patel, it neutralised the Patidar agitation. Through a mix of political carrots and sticks, it lured Congress legislators who had their own local constituencies of support and gave them tickets. Through a wholesale replacement of the Gujarat government, it warded off the anti-incumbency and anger that the party may have had to face after the pandemic’s mismanagement. And through relentless messaging, it ensured that voters realised that even if they wished to vote for a non-BJP alternative, there was none in the fray that could pose an effective challenge.

Every election win can be attributed to a complex set of factors. Every seat offers a political story of its own, driven by its geography, social mix, specific local issues, and the history of inter- and intraparty competition. But the big picture from Gujarat 2022 is simple. India’s western state is Narendra Modi territory. Modi respected the state and its voters with his energetic campaign; the state’s voters rewarded their son with a massive political win, yet another time. Together they made history.