Gujarat’s Hindutva heart

Rajesh Ramachandran

From a Hindutva laboratory to a one-man show, Gujarat has travelled a long distance. For a long time from 2002 to 2022, Gujarat’s politics has been more about Narendra Modi’s personality than the RSS or BJP organisation. Interestingly, even while his personality dominated the politics of the state, he never deviated from hard Hindutva. Modi knew that his success is only the success of the RSS cadre, their aspirations and the faith reposed in him as the Hindu Hridaya Samrat (emperor of Hindu hearts), a title that even the founding leaders of the BJP could not acquire. The stupendous Gujarat victory for the BJP, with an unheard-of tally of 156 seats out of 182, is the Hindutva seal of authority for Modi’s lasting claim on the title; added to this, obviously, is the feel-good factor that his PR team easily generates over Gujarati pride, showering Central projects on his home state, the latest being the Foxconn-Vedanta chip-making establishment.

If Arvind Kejriwal had been coy about Hindutva earlier, he is now brazenly playing the Hindu card and patiently waiting to succeed Modi.

But what has made this journey easy for Prime Minister Modi and the BJP is the lack of a real political opponent or an organisation that can take them on in Gujarat. Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Gujarat chhodo yatra’, as a cartoonist put it, hurt the party immeasurably in the state, much more than what analysts and politicos make out of it. The supreme leader of the Congress, while on a mobilisation drive all over the country, spending just a day or so in Gujarat — while walking for 18 days in Kerala, which does not have even a panchayat election! — is a sure sign of Rahul’s reluctance to take on Modi in his home state. Well, there are Congressmen who believe that the 2017 elections were stolen and the party should have won more than 77 seats that it finally got. But that should not have been a reason for the Congress to throw in the towel even before the bout had begun. Instead of fighting to the bitter end and trying to make gains, the Congress conceded defeat in Gujarat, exposing the local and central leadership’s complete lack of commitment to fight a bipolar contest.

Splitting Congress votes, finally, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party turned the contest into a three-cornered one. The credit for this goes entirely to Kejriwal’s fight against all odds, which bore fruit in winning five seats and 13 per cent votes. While being almost a non-entity, he unleashed immense energy and kept on pushing what one may call propaganda, falsehood, or simply his wish that AAP would win Gujarat. This self-belief helped Kejriwal make a successful foray into the Gujarat legislative Assembly, and also make AAP a national party. His ambitions are not limited to only 13 per cent vote share; he is inching closer to the bigger goal of getting himself labelled the Hindu Hridaya Samrat. If he had been coy about Hindutva earlier, he is now brazenly playing the Hindu card and patiently waiting to succeed Modi. Kejriwal had a choice between inclusive oppositional politics and Hindutva, and he has chosen the latter; he also seems to have decided to respectfully wait for his turn, as the photo-op with Modi at the all-party meeting shows, or as the statement seeking the PM’s support after the Delhi Municipal Corporation elections proves.

Gujarat is where Kejriwal wants his Prime Ministerial ambitions endorsed and it is here that he aims to turn the RSS cadre in his favour. A very clever attempt at oppositional politics within the Sangh Parivar, for those close to power and yet not a beneficiary of the gravy train, would be the ones most disenchanted and angry with the leadership. It was a bold and daring attempt to offer AAP as the RSS’s A team and chip away the Hindutva sheen from Modi and the BJP. Unfortunately, that did not work. It is not easy for the Hindutva voters of Gujarat to abandon Modi, whom they built up over the decades. After all, why should Hindutva voters support a person who till the other day was doling out the party ticket to activists anathema to them, such as Medha Patkar? But the immense effort and relentless campaigning did help in splitting the anti-incumbency vote and bringing down the Congress’ vote share to 27.28 per cent and seats to 17, a loss of a whopping 14 per cent votes and 60 seats.

This humongous loss cannot be offset by the Himachal Pradesh victory simply because the latter is an anti-incumbency vote that the local Congress organisation managed to accrue to its own kitty without letting it get frittered away, which happened in Gujarat. For one, even if the central leadership had further fuelled the local infighting and insecurities, the Congress is so deeply entrenched in Himachal that the voters did not have another option to express their unhappiness with the Jai Ram Thakur government. This is good old bipolar politics at work, where unhappiness against the party in power gets reflected in the Opposition regaining power. Like Gujarat, Rahul had abandoned Himachal without campaigning even for a day and now the Gandhi loyalists should not offer the credit of the Himachalis’ anger against the incumbent government to Priyanka Gandhi, who was not at all a factor in the elections.

The fact that it was a closely fought election in Himachal is visible in the difference in the vote share of the Congress and the BJP: 43.9 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively. It is stunning that a 0.9 per cent difference in the vote share can result in the BJP losing 19 seats, which only proves that the anger was not confined to any region, but was floating all across the state. Himachal holds a big lesson for the Congress party — that the Gandhis do not matter and all that it takes to win elections is the local organisation as a viable recipient of negative votes against the party in power.