2 Sides to Surat Walkover: Congress' Disarray, BJP's Desire for Total Domination

Congress workers have accused their Surat candidate Nilesh Kumbhani of being hand-in-glove with the BJP.

The BJP has won a Lok Sabha seat even without a single vote being cast. This is what happened in Gujarat's Surat Lok Sabha seat after Congress candidate Nilesh Kumbhani's nomination got rejected and the other candidates from BSP and Independents withdrew their nominations.

Kumbhani's nomination was rejected after the Election Commission said it found discrepancies in signatures of the people proposing his candidature. He has since gone incommunicado and Congress leaders and workers have no idea about his whereabouts.

The entire episode revealed two clear trends in Gujarat politics: the complete disarray in the state Congress.

Disarray in the Congress

Now, two of the people who had proposed his name happen to be his relatives and one is a friend. Kumbhani has since gone incommunicado. This has led many to allege deliberate wrongdoing. For instance, local Congress workers have been protesting outside Kumbhani's home, calling him "Janta ka Gaddar".

If the allegations by the Congress workers are true, it raises serious questions about the Congress' election management in the state.

If Kumbhani has indeed been compromised, as the protesting Congress workers are alleging, how did no one in the party hierarchy come to know?

The Congress has a general secretary and secretary in-charge for each state, there are screening committees for candidate selection, committees for handling the campaign at state as well as district level, the Congress has units right till the ward and block level.

Why did the feedback that one of its candidates could possibly have gone rogue not reach the party?

This isn't just about Surat.

The Gujarat Congress has been in disarray for some time now.

It's high point was the manner in which it gave the BJP a shock in the 2017 Assembly elections, bringing the saffron party's tally below 100 for the first time in two decades. It was a personal blow for PM Narendra Modi and the then BJP president Amit Shah in their home state.

However, since then, the party has suffered a series of defections. Eight MLAs left in 2020, more left in 2022. The Congress faced a massive debacle in the 2022 Assembly elections as its tally came down to 17 from 77 in 2017.

Most recently, former Leader of the Opposition Arjun Modhwadia, left the Congress and joined the BJP. He is now the BJP candidate from the Porbandar Lok Sabha seat. Modhwadia was among the most steadfast faces of the Gujarat Congress and his defection came as a shock to many.

Another former Leader of the Opposition to leave Congress for BJP is Mohansinh Rathwa.

Now, Modhwadia and Rathwa also represent important regions and social sections and were critical to Congress' social engineering. While Rathwa is a prominent Adivasi leader from Chhota Udepur district, Modhwadia belongs to the OBC Mer community and was among the Congress most prominent faces in Saurashtra.

Congress insiders say that the 2022 drubbing could have been an opportunity for the party to cultivate a new kind of leadership, promoting the likes of Geniben Thakor, Anant Patel and Jignesh Mevani as young OBC, Adivasi and Dalit faces respectively.

However, the Surat episode and Modhwadia's exit revealed that the Congress leadership is not in control of its own organisation in the state and the BJP is able to create breaches and engineer defections at will.

This brings us to the second aspect.

BJP's Desire for Complete Domination

The first thing that BJP's winning candidate from Surat Mukesh Dalal did after being elected unopposed was to take his winning certificate to state BJP chief CR Paatil.

Paatil on his part said that the Gujarat win was the "first lotus gifted to PM Narendra Modi" in his quest for taking the NDA tally beyound 400 Lok Sabha seats.

This desire for complete domination has been one of the hallmarks of the kind of politics PM Modi and Amit Shah have been pursuing nationally and CR Paatil has taken this to the next level in Gujarat.

"The idea isn't just to win. It is to send the message that there is no one in the battlefield except for the BJP," a party functionary told The Quint.

This is particularly important in the Surat context. BJP won the last two elections from Surat by margins of over 5 lakh votes. The BJP secured over 70 percent votes in the seat and head a gap of more than 50 percentage points over the Congress.

Therefore, there was no serious chance that the BJP could have lost this seat. Yet, the entire Surat fiasco happened.

And it wasn't just the Congress candidate who is accused of being hand-in-glove with the BJP. According to a story by Scroll, one of the Independent candidates also claimed he was "contacted by the BJP".

An inside story in the BJP is that there is a competition between supporters of candidates in Gujarat to have the highest margin of the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

The two seats that are being watched most closely are Union Home Minister Amit Shah's seat Gandhinagar and CR Paatil's seat Navsari. Patil had the highest margin in 2019 at 6.89 lakh. Interestingly in the 2024 elections, BJP dropped as many as 12 of the candidates with highest margins in 2019, with Shah and Paatil being among the few survivors.

Now with Surat being decided without an election, the competition for the highest margin has become slightly narrower.