Is the worst over for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi? After a long interval, the stars seem to be smiling again on the saffron leader with the surprise victory of the party in five of the seven seats in the by-election results announced on Monday.
The victory is particularly significant because Modi had experimented with a novel strategy - he had not campaigned himself at all, but micro-managed every detail ofcampaigning from his bungalow in Gandhinagar. In what the Congress termed as “clandestine meetings in the middle of the night”, district and taluka-level BJP workers were being summoned to his residence for fine tuning the campaign details.
But the most striking loss for the Congress was Jasdan seat, which the party lost for the first time in 50 years! On its part, Congress blamed wrong selection of candidates for the debacle. “Dynastic politics has been rejected by Gujarat voters. Most of the candidates were either directly related to the MP of the region, or selected by them because of allied business interests. In some cases, like Dehgam and Sami Harij, the candidate was not even a resident of the seat,” a source in the party said. Congress’s candidate Bhavna Bavalia in Jasdan (defeated), Manoj Jinjaria in Chotila (defeated) and Jayesh Radadia in Dhoraji (won) are all children of the MLAs who held the seat.
Sources said that when the candidates were selected, state party president Siddharth Patel had intimated the party high command that these candidates could not lead the party to victory, and he should not be blamed for the party’s eventual performance. Sources added the initial calculations were based on the voting pattern of Lok Sabha results - suggesting that Congress would get four seats and BJP three.“We have won Jasdan seat in Rajkot that BJP had never won since Independence. It shows that the people of Gujarat have faith in BJP and the Modi government,” BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said, adding that it had come despite the “motivated and renewed campaign” against Modi by Congress using the Ishrat Jahan encounter controversy.
State BJP president Purshottam Rupala said the people have rejected the dynastic politics of Congress and endorsed the development model of Gujarat.
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