The Seventh Wave: BJP breaks all records in Gujarat as 'Kejriwall' debris buries Congress

Surprises won’t cease. Like the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose victory march shows no sign of pause. In an election that many forecast would see Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party snatch the Gujarat crown from the head of the saffron outfit or at least stun it, Modi power has prevailed again.

And how. Everything has crumbled under the Bharatiya Janata juggernaut: the new Opposition, the old Opposition, the cliched themes of anti-incumbency and voter apathy, it’s all gone, wiped out.
Gujarat, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state and the one place his opponents would love to see him fall, is in seventh saffron heaven with the highest seat count yet for the BJP. If Gujarat was where Modi would be checked in the run to the big fight of 2024, it didn’t happen.

A miss is as good as a mile, and even a narrow Congress or AAP victory like Madhya Pradesh in 2018 would have been a political earthquake to end 2022. Indeed, AAP victories were forecast by the faithful but not only has Kejriwal’s party been pipped by a worse-than-usual Congress, it may not get the 15 per cent of the state vote required to mutate into a national party. That’s a place where Nitish, Naidu, KCR, Akhilesh, haven’t made it to, and where Kejriwal would love to be.

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True, AAP has snatched the Delhi municipal corporation from the 15-year-old grasp of the BJP, but that was hardly the sweeping victory Kejriwal had announced in advance. More than anything, it’s the next Delhi Assembly elections that AAP needs to worry about, particularly if the state unit of the BJP gets its act together like in the rest of India.

That leaves Kejriwal’s potential claim to lead the Opposition charge against the Modi-led BJP in tatters. The coming Opposition Jodo Yatra will now be an even more fractious affair. The road to 2024 has been straightened to that extent for Modi.

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Numbers aside, Kejriwal’s freefestoe doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Rewdi from Delhi doesn’t sell too well in the land of dhokla and khakra; Gujarat wants development, not charity.

The Congress is in a bad place. Again. Right from 2002 when Modi burst upon the scene, the Grand Old Party has been hovering near a very respectable 40 per cent voteshare mark. That milestone was crossed in 2017 when the Congress managed to give the BJP a scare with its 77-seat bag.

It must be noted in passing that the BJP has been near the 50 per cent voteshare mark since 2002, and broke on through this time. The Congress share has fallen drastically for the first time in decades; yes, AAP ate the Congress while the BJP was winning big.

The Congress continues to waffle between endangered status and extinction, pulling off a Chhattisgarh or Himachal to keep its pulse flickering. Next year’s major elections feature Congress-ruled states Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, besides its old strongholds of Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. Anti-incumbency may still be at play in the first two, because it seems to have become a non-factor for the BJP.

Just like rewdi.

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