Gujarat Assembly Elections 2017: Five Key Takeaways

The Quint’s Editor-in-Chief Raghav Bahl’s five takeaways from the Gujarat Assembly Elections.

There’s a wonderful story in cricket: an umpire was simply refusing to give a batsman out, despite a couple of plumb LBW strikes. So when the batsman’s stumps were knocked out of the ground, the bowler looked at the umpire quizzically:

Umpire: “He is clean bowled.”

Bowler: “I know that sir, but is he out?”

Gujarat’s election results are as quizzically inscrutable. The BJP formed the government, but did it “win”? And the Congress lost, but did it “win” a psychological upper? Whoever wants to answer these questions will have to stretch their neck out and wait for it to be chopped!

Also Read: Gujarat, Himachal Elections: The Quint Analyses the Big Picture

There comes a “resurrection moment” in politics. Mrs Indira Gandhi saw it in Karnataka in 1978; VP Singh in Allahabad a decade later; the Labour party in the UK this year – and I am willing to bet that a Rahul-led Congress has witnessed some such moment on Monday. Here, my neck is now stretched out taut.

Haul up the guillotine, but here are my five key takeaways from Gujarat Assembly Polls 2017.

• It was Gujarat; it was Modi; but Rahul had the gumption to put himself up for a potential political slaughter
  Prime Minister Modi, the iconic ‘son of the soil’ who dare not be challenged, epitomises Gujarat. And then there is Rahul Gandhi, an outsider, a man smarting from successive political defeats, written off, and lampooned in the media. But he had the guts to go head-to-head against the ‘Superman’. Rahul Gandhi entered the ‘lion’s den’ when he could have very well stayed out of it.

The ‘Lion’ could have crushed him, and his obituaries would have screamed aloud from every nook and cranny. But Rahul came tantalisingly close – just 4 percentage points away (up by 12 percentage points from 2014, and 6 percentage points from 2012) – to vanquishing somebody who was seen until this morning as politically indestructible and immortal.

So Prime Minister Modi did not win, and Rahul did not lose. On the index of political courage, Rahul scored. That’s my primary takeaway from Monday’s dramatic results.

Also Read: Himachal Election Result: CPM Wins Theog, Where ‘Gudiya’ Was Raped

A Double-Incumbency Disadvantage

• BJP’s spectacular UP victory was not a trend-line, but the peak
  I remember saying this to my editors even then – BJP and Prime Minister Modi have peaked with UP. Most political pundits were seeing the UP juggernaut as a trend that was likely to accelerate towards an even bigger BJP victory in 2019 – but to me, the UP victory was the culmination of BJP’s incumbency advantage.

All the state elections that the BJP had won since 2014 – Haryana, Maharashtra, UP, Uttarakhand, among others – were those where the BJP was the underdog riding on PM Modi’s 2014 tail-(whirl)winds.

• BJP is struggling to neutralise a double-incumbency disadvantage
  Punjab, DUSU, Goa, Bawana, Chitrakoot, UP local polls – I have deliberately mixed up students’ unions, municipalities, panchayats, by-elections and assembly polls. Except for in Bawana (where it had an indirect double-incumbency disadvantage since it had fielded an AAP defector), the BJP weathered stunning reverses wherever it was in power at both local and national levels. This rings an ominous warning for the party in the upcoming polls: First, the Lok Sabha by-elections in Phulpur, Gorakhpur, Ajmer, Alwar, and a Muslim-dominated constituency in Bihar.

This will be followed by assembly polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The Congress could go for the kill in all, and could use its “resurrection” in Gujarat to ensure that it’s no longer starved of funds from donors who would now like to hedge their bets!

Also Read: Gujarat Election Results: Hardik Says EVM Fraud Led to Close Fight

The Wounds of One’s Own Sting

• After successfully spinning demonetisation and GST, the BJP is now suffering its bite
  Prime Minister Modi was exceptionally successful in spinning demonetisation as a “pro-honest and anti-rich” crusade, especially within the first few months. People willingly suffered terrible hardship, but politically endorsed what they saw as an audacious assault that brought the dishonest to their knees. His spectacular victories in BJP and Uttarakhand can be attributed as much to the initial popularity of demonetisation as it can to the shortcomings of the incumbents. But with the sheen wearing off, compounded by botch-ups of a flawed GST architecture, the misery of ordinary people is now beginning to visit the BJP.

The Prime Minister will have to work exceptionally hard, and be open to practical suggestions from even his adversaries (something he is loath to do) to take the sting out of this dual-bite.

• 2019 is wide open; Rahul/Congress would be the fulcrum, and a united Opposition is imperative
  As soon as the BJP’s four-fifth victory in the UP assembly was proclaimed, pundits had begun to call game, set and match in 2019. It was all over for Rahul Gandhi, Congress and the Opposition. The BJP would ride in, on its own, with 350 seats in the Lok Sabha in 2019, so go figure! But that narrative has today been effectively culled in Gujarat, which is ironically, the Prime Minister’s janam-and-karma bhoomi (the land of his birth and achievements). 2019 is wide open, provided a broad alliance of the Congress, DMK, TMC, BSP and SP can be crafted. Rahul should do everything to whip that into shape – and be sure that the formidable Modi-Shah combination will do everything to scuttle it. On that shall now hinge the battle for 2019.

Looking Ahead

Those were my five takeaways from Gujarat. Before I conclude, I would like to slip in a sixth, provided the Prime Minister is open to suggestions.

• Narendra Modi must re-pivot to the Centre, else the moderate vote he won in 2014 could slip away in 2019
  If you look at Lok Sabha polls from 1999 onwards, the BJP and Congress have kept about 50% of the national vote between themselves, averaging about 25% apiece (don’t hold me to precise arithmetic, because the last decimal point here is not in contention). In 2014, Modi broke the barricade by apportioning five percentage points of the centrist Congress vote for himself (by burnishing his development credentials, lowering the communal/religious pitch and appealing to secular Indians). So he got 30% plus, and Congress slipped to 20% minus, in 2014.

That gave him the astronomical victory. Today’s Gujarat poll shows that unless Prime Minister Modi is willing to visibly re-pivot to the Center, and stamp out, ruthlessly, his swivel towards or indulgence of the “right fringe”, he could lose this five percentage points’ moderate vote back to the Congress.

That would pull the BJP/Congress back into the 25% apiece bracket. And that would simply mean that 2019 will become a wide open race.

Follow counting day live updates here.

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