Ahmedabad: With just three more days of campaigning to go, the capital city of Gujarat is unusually quiet. The perplexing silence gets shattered occasionally with gales of laughter when Narendra Modi’s boast of the BJP taking all 26 Lok Sabha seats in his home state is mentioned.
Whatever the surveys or BJP leaders may say, no one seems to believe that this is going to happen.
Even BJP office-bearers openly talk of how miffed they are with the party leadership and complain that there is little campaign activity and very little gui-dance for the workers. They also talk of confusion and fights and slights, and of several BJP MLAs working against the party’s LS candidates.
Gujarat, they say, is stuck in a limbo. “The majority will vote for Mr Modi on April 30, but where is he? The leaders seem of be overconfident that hum toh Gujarat jeetne hi waale hain. But of the 26 seats, I give them 18-20,” a senior party worker said.
The BJP, at least on paper, has strategised bea-utifully, especially through its programme of “page pramukhs.” Each booth has about 1,000 voters and each voter page has 48 voters. A ‘page pramukh’ is assigned one page and must interact with each voter. This door-to-door campaign is mostly to ensure a higher voter turnout which, the BJP believes, will work in its favour. That may not be the case as the BJP’s vote share in Gujarat in the 2009 LS polls was just three per cent more than that of Congress. In many constituencies, page pramukhs haven’t been appointed.
But many BJP MLAs and MPs, seem to have internalised the ‘we’ll-take-it-all’ boast as a target they must try and hit. But even their resolve seems to be waning as their senior leaders don’t seem to have time for them.
On Thursday, Nitin Gadkari did not reach a meeting he was to address in Bapunagar, which falls in Ahmedababd East Lok Sabha constituency from where Paresh Rawal is making his political debut.
Mr Rawal was in Mumbai and Mr Gadkari got late for the meeting organised a residential colony where the crowd of about 200 people that had assembled seemed to be mostly BJP workers and families.
Local MLA Jagroopsinh Rajput explained that in Bapunagar, which has approximately 40,000 Muslims, he is expecting about 200 votes each from the 37 minority booths. A few Muslim boys said they will vote for the BJP. “Really, where is the Congress,” they asked.
