BJP turns to PM to retain Gujarat

After Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead the campaign for the Gujarat Assembly polls slated for the next year. Hit by strong anti-incumbency, Patidar and dalit agitations, a worried BJP government in the state is also contemplating going for an early election along with Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Chief minister Vijay Rupani has reportedly asked the party to be “battle ready.”

With AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal rapidly making inroads into the saffron citadel, the BJP is once again leaning on Mr Modi to retain Gujarat. Since August, Mr Modi has been regularly visiting Gujarat.

After Mr Modi shifted base to Delhi to take charge of the nation, the BJP has been struggling in his home state, Gujarat. The brewing resentment of the Patidars, which had been kept under check by Mr Modi’s deft handling, is out in the open. And after the attack on dalits in Una, the ruling BJP finds itself cornered from all sides.

Sources said that though Mr Rupani has been handpicked by the BJP high command, he was “not being able to control the situation” and during the 2017 assembly polls the state could possibly slip out of BJP’s grip. The state unit and even the ruling state government is now looking upto Mr Modi to change the scenario.

Besides Mr Kejriwal, the leader of the Patidar agitation, Hardik Patel, has also invited Bihar CM Nitish Kumar to Gujarat to support the demand of reservation for the Patidar community.

The Prime Minister started his Gujarat visit from August and till date he visited the state at least five times. To pacify the influential Patidar community, Mr Modi visited Sarangpur in north Gujarat. Then he addressed a rally at nervecentre of the Patel agitation at Dhrol of Jamnagar in north Gujarat. He inaugurated the Saurashtra Narmada Avataran for Irrigation (SAUNI) project.

In September he reached Ahmedabad to seek his mother’s blessings for his 66th birthday. To win over the tribals, Mr Modi distributed kits to the physically challenged in the tribal district of Navsari in South Gujarat. On Saturday, he inaugurated the international airport at Vadodara.

His regular trips to Gujarat have made it evident that a concerned BJP is depending on the Prime Minister as he continues to remain the party’s star campaigner and main vote catcher. Speaking to this newspaper, a senior BJP leader said; “No one in the BJP can match the stature of Modiji. We not only need him in UP to lead the campaign, the party needs him in Gujarat too.”

That the BJP was in a major mess in Gujarat became clear when the party was routed in last year’s local elections. It lost the majority of district and taluk panchayats to the Congress following the Patidar unrest. It may be recalled the party faced another humiliation when Patidar activists forced the ruling BJP to wind up a function being attended by BJP chief Amit Shah and the state chief minister at Surat in September.