Narendra Modi’s campaign goes door to door

Vadodara:  The BJP campaign to elect Narendra Modi by a record margin from Vadodara has already begun in earnest, less than a week after the announcement of his candidature from the city and even before he has filed his nomination papers.

Balkrishna Shukla, the sitting BJP MP from Vadodara who won the seat in 2009 with a margin of 1.36 lakh votes (highest in Gujarat for BJP), is personally at the forefront of the campaign. He has vacated his seat and is not contesting the polls. Instead, he now goes door to door to campaign for Mr Modi.

The exercise started on Tuesday with around 25 BJP workers congregating near Mr Shukla’s office in the old quarters of Vadodara. The MP, who was clad simply in a plain shirt and trousers, pulled a saffron cloth out of his pocket and hung it around his neck as he approached the meeting place.

After smiles and hellos, the group of men and women raised a few cries of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Swagat hai bhai swagat hai, Modi ji ka swagat hai” before walking into the narrow lanes of the old city.

This is an area with a large Marathi-speaking population that has been here since the days when the Gaekwad kings ruled Baroda, as it was known. The MP and his aides are locals, but they went prepared with names and addresses from the voters’ list. Mr Shukla picked the houses he wanted to visit. Along the way, he and his supporters also paused at random to canvass support from shopkeepers and bystanders.

One of the early stops was at the workshop of an artisan making Ganpati idols of clay. The artist, an old man of 80 with the surname Kolhatkar, comes from a family of renowned state makers, said Mr Shukla.

The first public Ganpati festival outside current Maharashtra was in Vadodara, according to him. “It was started here by a Muslim pehelwan 112 years ago. It remains an example of cultural harmony given to the country by Vadodara”, he says. The idol for that first Ganpati festival was made by Mr Kolhatkar’s father, he adds.