Not Varanasi, Modi's 'karmabhoomi' Vadodara matters more to BJP

Vadodara: The road to Delhi winds its way through Uttar Pradesh and the Hindi cowbelt, you have been told ad nauseam in the past two months. And, while it follows that Narendra Modi can hardly give up Varanasi if he goes on to win from the holy town of Kashi as well as from Vadodara, the latter city will perhaps play the bigger role in Modi’s plans for 16 May. For, despite that showmanship around the filing of nomination papers in Varanasi, it is in Vadodara that the really dramatic plans are at work. Thousands of BJP karyakartas are at work with the express task of ensuring not just a big win for Modi in Vadodara but a prodigious, statement-making one. It must be a thundering victory that lends itself to high decibel theatrics, chest-thumping and shout-outs that a historical moment is underway in India. [caption id=“attachment_1499563” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Modi filing his nomination in Vadodara: PTI[/caption] Possibly the biggest reason for picking Vadodara is the possibility of a really big win. The BJP wants to post a record victory margin, in the range of seven lakh, a victory that no constituency in independent India has ever seen. Sitting MP of Vadodara Balu Shukla who has vacated the seat for Modi says the PM candidate will record a bigger victory margin than that set by the CPM’s Anil Basu who stood from the Arambagh constituency in 2004 – 5,92,502 votes more than his closest rival. Former Modi acolyte and now NDA partner Ram Vilas Paswan has hit the 5,00,000 vote margin once, in 1989 on a Janata Dal ticket. “This victory will be bigger than the biggest until now,” Shukla says confidently, ahead of a mega rally planned in Vadodara on Monday, the very last day of campaigning. Such a victory is not conceivable in Ahmedabad East where there are pockets that traditionally vote for the Congress. (Ahmedabad West is anyway a reserved seat where Modi cannot contest though his MLA constituency Maninagar falls here.) Vadodara, on the contrary, is almost entirely urban, with just a couple of semi-rural areas. These two, Savli and Vaghodia, saw the Congress candidate finish first in the 2009 general election, while the BJP candidate led with large margins in each of the other five – the margins were 31,000-odd in vadodara City, 31,000-odd in Sayajigunj, nearly 29,000 in Akota and almost 34,000 in Manjalpur. That performance was improved upon in the 2012 Assembly elections by which time there had been a delimitation exercise. The BJP won all Assembly constituencies that now comprise Vadodara Lok Sabha constituency with some of the margins of victory as follows: Vadodara City was won by the BJP by nearly 52,000 votes; Sayajigunj by over 57,000 votes, Akota by about 50,000 votes, Raopura by over 41,000 votes, Manjalpur by nearly 52,000 votes. Just going by the 2012 Assembly wins, there is already a 2,50,000-strong lead in the Parliamentary constituency, local BJP workers argue. And that is without the Modi factor. The seven lakh-margin is still improbable, say Congress leaders, but with the huge push in Vadodara to raise voter awareness and set record turnouts, nobody will bet on this just yet. Besides, there is also the culture and history attached to Vadodara, the erstwhile princely state of the Gaekwads. Royal family members have contested and won the Vadodara seat on Congress tickets in the distant past, but at least in the past couple of years, the BJP has won over the royals. Current maharajah Samarjit Sinh is a member of the BJP and president of the Baroda cricket Association, Rajmata Shubhanginiraje Scindia of the Gaekwad family accompanied Modi as a supporter when he filed his nominations. Another royal family member, Asha Raje Gaekwad, has also declared her support for Modi too. Not just the culture capital of the state, Vadodara is also home to some beautiful architecture and memorabilia, a legacy of Sayajirao Gaekwad III. “Besides, Modi_ji_ has lived in Vadodara in his younger days as a pracharak, he has worked there,” says BJP leader Yamal Vyas, a member of the Gujarat State Third Finance Commission. Modi lived in the Shastripol area of the town for about five years in the 1970s. That old connect with the RSS is also there in Vadodara, the city where his RSS guru Madhukarrao Bhagwat had once lived. Not only did Modi call the city his “karmabhoomi” while filing his nomination, he also mentioned that he studied in a primary school established by the Gawekwads, and has benefited “immensely” from other institutions set up by the royal family. Vyas says the geographical location of the Vadodara seat is also significant. Picking Ahmedabad East would have meant positioning two heavyweights right next to each other, Modi in Ahmedabad and Advani in adjoining Gandhinagar. On Gandhinagar, there is of course a whole side plot that BJP leaders will not talk about. The buzz is that Modi supporters began to work for Advani’s campaign in Gandhinagar only after an RSS diktat. Ahmedabad has its own little tale of guile that party leaders prefer to ignore, the easing out of Harin Pathak, seven-time MP from Ahmedabad (East), who has been made to sit out for no apparent reason. The party gave the ticket to Bollywood ator Paresh Rawal, apparently on explicit instructions from Modi for who Rawal campaigned in the 2012 Assembly elections. Pathak is known to be not just a loyal party worker but also a highly effective MP. Truth is, a seven-time MP winning his eighth term is not exactly comfortable for a PM candidate who will be a first-timer in Lok Sabha. The Gandhinagar and Harin Pathak scripts remain incomplete, and they are bound to return to the headlines sooner rather than later. The geographical location of the Vadodara seat is significant for one more reason – the Gujarat BJP’s Mission 26/26, the other grand ambition to make Modi’s win historical by making a clean sweep of Gujarat’s 26 LS seats. Everything in the landscape of Gujarat politics right now is focused on making Modi PM. And therefore, Mission 26 is almost as important as Mission 272. Just as in UP where his presence in the fray is expected to boost the BJP’s results in the surrounding region, the party hopes that its troubles in the tribal seats nearby will be resolved by Modi’s Vadodara candidature. “In Chhota Udepur we are struggling a bit,” admitted one BJP leader. the BJP won it in 2009 but the track record of the seat has been less than stable, the BJP candidate winning it in 1999, losing in 2004. Like Chhota Udepur, another tribal-dominated seat Panchmahal, also won by the BJP in 2009, appears slightly shaky. Besides, the other three seats in the central Gujarat region, Anand, Kheda and Dahod, are with the Congress. Despite the bluster over Mission 26, BJP leaders say they have, realistically speaking, about 18 seats they are certain of, and their foot in the door of another four. The Modi-for-PM branding and the accompanying noise over Gujarati ‘asmita’ (pride) and a relentless exhortation to vote a Gujarati to the country’s highest chair could see the BJP through those uncertain seats. Alongside Mission 26, there are other equally tall targets – to improve upon the best-ever performance by a party in Gujarat (Madhavsinh Solanki-led Congress win 24 in 1984) and the best-ever show by the BJP in Gujarat (Keshubhai Patel’s 21 out of 26 in the 1990s). Seen in the context of these targets, Modi’s appeals to voters in Gujarat to hold his hand and lead him to Delhi become a real tapping of the Gujarati asmita. Just everything about the Modi juggernaut has been, until now, larger than life, and the same is true of the Vadodara campaign where Modi himself has been largely in absentia. But he can still expect the city to play its role in what the BJP expects will be a historical moment. Read the rest of Kavitha Iyer’s reports from Gujarat: Pro Modi candidate tells Muslims not to vote for Advani Gujarat: Ahead of polls nothing apolitical about Ramdev’s yoga camps AAP on auto-pilot in Ahmedabad: You see the rickshaw, but who’s the candidate? Modi’s man Paresh Rawal missing in Ahmedabad, but BJP unfazed