Gujarat polls: Not AAP but Cong’s turncoats reason for BJP’s landslide victory, 34 of 37 won   

The Gujarat assembly poll results threw very harsh message to the Congress party which reduced to 17 seats from the 77 in the 2017 assembly elections. Instead of introspection, the party started blaming the AAP for the poor performance even as top leaders accuse the Arvind Kejriwal party of being the B team of the BJP.

On the other hand, the state leadership’s failure to ‘prevent exodus’ of its MLAs to the BJP in the last five years, remained hidden. Most of the Congress leaders who had switched over to the BJP since 2017 have won the 2022 assembly elections.

There is no doubt that the AAP ate away most of the Congress votes, but it is equally right that a significant chunk of the party’s traditional votes went to the BJP, thanks to the poor image of local leaders.

The Congress had fielded 37 leaders who switched to the party from the Congress — most of them were sitting MLAs at the time of joining, according to Hindustan Times.

Of them, 34 leaders scored electoral victories, including OBC leader Alpesh Thakor (Gandhinagar south), Patidar leader Hardik Patel (Viramgam) and popular Koli leader and six-time MLA Kunvarji Bavalia (Jasdan), reported the paper. Of these 37, 20 leaders had switched to the BJP after the 2017 assembly elections, while 17 had joined ahead of the 2017 Rajya Sabha elections — in which late senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel won by one vote. The three sitting legislators who switched sides and were given tickets but did not win are: Ashwin Kotwal (Khedbrahma), Jawahar Chavda (Manavadar) and Harshad Ribadiya (Visavadar).

The AAP won five seats with a vote share of 12.9 percent in Gujarat assembly elections. The party in 2017 had fielded candidates in 29 constituencies and drew a blank in terms of the seat count and won a vote share of 0.1 percent.

On the other hand, the BJP has not only improved its best showing till date — 127 seats in 2002 —  but also surpassed the record set by the Congress party in 1985, when it won 149 seats under the leadership of the late Madhavsinh Solanki, following the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi. The party won a record 156 seats with a staggering 52.5 percent vote share, dwarfing the Opposition Congress and the AAP, which got over 27 per cent and about 13 per cent vote share respectively. The Congress got just 17 seats while the AAP managed to bag five. Independents won three seats and the Samajwadi Party picked up one.

Meanwhile, in a latest attack on AAP, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said that the Arvind Kejriwal-led party has “played a spoiler” for the grand old party in Gujarat. Like in Goa and Uttarakhand, the Arvind Kejriwal party played spoiler in Gujarat, said Chidambaram, but added the party did not have much appeal outside Delhi with exception of Haryana and Punjab. In an interview to news agency PTI, the senior Congress leader, however, said the Congress is “best placed to be the pole” for the non-BJP front in the 2024 parliamentary elections.

– INDIA NEWS STREAM