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September 7, 2009

Narendra Modi: Vallata paani chhe (the waters are receding). Vandita Mishra

Vandita Mishra :

Tags : Gujarat CM, Narendra Modi Posted: Sunday , Sep 06, 2009 at 0337 hrs
Ahmedabad:

Vallata paani chhe (the waters are receding). As Gujarat gears up for seven Assembly by-polls next Thursday, this is the phrase being spoken and heard in the political corridors of Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad.
When the war within the BJP is the dominant theme in Delhi, the refrain in Gujarat is that the party’s brightest star Narendra Modi may just be losing a bit of his lustre.
Consider these:
n Unlike in the countdown to the Lok Sabha elections, when Modi publicly staked claim to at least 21 seats in his state — the BJP won 15 — no figure is being touted by him or by the Gujarat BJP on his behalf, even to boost the morale of party workers this time. With six of the seven seats headed to the hustings held by the Congress, the official BJP line is that it is a low-stakes election for the ruling party.
All indications are that Modi may not even campaign. “So far, it (Modi going to campaign) is not part of the design”, says state BJP president Purshottam Rupala. “In Assembly by-polls, it is generally left to the local leaders to ask for campaigners,” he says. Modi’s office declined several requests for an interview.
But the Opposition sees his low profile as low confidence. They recall his high-voltage campaign for a much smaller electoral test — the Ahmedabad municipal polls in 2005 — to win a corporation held by the Congress but seen to be ripe for the BJP’s picking.
Says Leader of Opposition Congress Shaktisinh Gohil, “When bypolls take place, it’s always the ruling party that is on test. Modi is attempting to play down their importance because for the first time, he is placed in unfavourable circumstances — both vis a vis the BJP crisis in Delhi and in Gujarat.”
•The strategy for the Assembly by-polls is in sharp contrast to the upping of the stakes by the BJP in the more recent Junagadh corporation election held in July which it lost. Though Modi stayed away from Junagadh too, the BJP deployed three “stalwart” candidates in the corporation fray: Bhavnaben Chikhalia, former Union Minister; former MP Mohanbhai Patel, and sitting Junagadh MLA Mahendra Mashroo.
Almost the entire Modi cabinet camped at Junagadh and a Rs 600-crore package was announced on poll-eve for the region in which Junagadh falls. To win the election in a city with a significant Muslim population — estimated at over 20 per cent — for the first time ever, the BJP fielded Muslim candidates.
The BJP plays down the loss in Junagadh. “Does anyone know who won the last corporation polls in Kolkata, or Bangalore, or Pune?” asks Amit Shah, minister of state for Home and a key Modi aide. But its defeat has provided a crucial leg-up to the long sagging Congress energies in the state.
“The Congress can replicate the Junagadh victory elsewhere in Gujarat if it implements the strategy of micro-level social engineering we followed there”, boasts Nishit Vyas, general-secretary in the Gujarat Congress, one of the three deputed to oversee the Junagadh polls. In the 51-member corporation, the BJP went down from 31 to 21 while the Congress gained from 15 to 29.
• Even results of cooperative elections are being flaunted by one and rationalised by the other. The Congress won the elections to the Amul cooperative at Anand held in July. Even though the Congress has traditionally controlled most of the state cooperatives — it was holding Amul as well — it’s touting this win. “The BJP was not able to wrest Amul”, says Gohil, “despite the fact that Amit Shah personally monitored the campaign.” Counters Shah, “Anand and Kheda have been traditionally Congress districts and our loss margins have come down”.
• For Modi-baiters as well as Modi-believers — but much more for the latter — Modi’s selection of Bhavsinh Rathor as a contestant in the LS elections and then once again in the upcoming Assembly by-polls after Rathor lost the LS polls, is a turning point of sorts.
Rathor, the sitting Congress MLA in Patan, switched over to the BJP just before the LS polls, and then from the BJP platform announced his openness to a better bargain from the Congress. Convicted in a narcotics smuggling case, he has spent a few years in a Kerala jail.
Rathor’s repeat candidature in the impending by-polls is being read as Modi’s acknowledgement of his own slipping appeal, and therefore his need to rely on Rathor-style “winnability”.
• The recent hooch tragedy in Gujarat which claimed over 130 lives — and the political response to it — is also seen to have stoked perceptions of a fumbling administration slowed down by eight years of incumbency. “We have brought in a stricter law, and set up a commission to reform the Act”, says Amit Shah. But Congress leaders have been quick to seize on Modi’s silence. “He did not visit the affected areas, not even his own constituency of Maninagar”, says Gohil. The Assembly was in session, he points out, but Modi did not speak on the tragedy in the House.
While Modi has never been an active presence in the Assembly — for instance, breaking the Gujarat convention of the chief minister hearing out the leader of opposition when he speaks in the House — his unbroken silence this time is being read more as a sign of his political discomfort.
• The 2002 riots probe and the Special Investigation Team — working under the Supreme Court — sit like the proverbial elephant in his room, especially after the Supreme Court allowed the SIT to probe complaints against the Chief Minister.
• Officially, the Congress party has been evasive on the Modi government’s ban on Jaswant Singh’s book for its alleged denigration of Sardar Patel. But, in private, Congress leaders describe the rush to ban — without even a cursory detailing of the reasons, on account of which the High Court struck down the ban yesterday — as Modi’s attempt to woo the powerful community back into the BJP fold and to reconstruct his fragmenting political support around an emotive and overriding theme.
While the so-called Patel uprising against Modi made much noise but delivered little in the Assembly polls in 2007, analyses of the 2009 Lok Sabha results have shown the movement of a significant section of the community’s vote away from the BJP. “There has been a swing in the Patel vote for the Congress”, claims state Congress president Sidharth Patel. “The shift has begun,” he claims.