The fight for the Opposition space in Gujarat

AAP leader Gopal Italia recently won the Visavadar Assembly seat in Gujarat. This may look like a one-off feat, but it adds to growing evidence that the AAP is eating into the Congress’s vote share in the State.

Mr. Italia, 35, a former police constable who had once hurled a shoe at the then Minister of State for Home, defeated the BJP’s Kirit Patel by 17,554 votes. The Congress came third. The AAP had won from here in the Assembly elections in 2022, but its MLA resigned in December 2023 and defected to the BJP, which necessitated the by-election.

The AAP now has five legislators in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly. The Congress has 12 (down from 17 after defections and one candidate’s Lok Sabha win). There is critical sub-text here to indicate how the AAP is emerging as an alternative to the Congress.

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With a vote share of 13% in 2022, the AAP had finished as the first runner-up in 44 seats where the Congress candidates forfeited their election deposits. In 33 seats, the combined strength of the two Opposition parties was higher than that of the BJP winners. These were seats besides the 17 won by the Congress and five won by the AAP.

The AAP took the electoral plunge in Gujarat in 2017. Though it did not secure a single seat, it dug its heels in. Subsequently, the party’s only strategy was to be visible on the ground and be seen helping people get work done from the local government offices. AAP activists unearthed as many as 170 local scams of varying values in the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC). Later, they exposed a State-level multi-crore government exam paper leak racket, which forced the government to cancel the test. Against this, the Congress has generally been absent and has not posed any challenge to the government.

It was no surprise then that the AAP emerged as the Opposition party in the SMC elections in 2020. It secured 27 seats against 93 of the BJP in the 120-member SMC; the Congress did not win any. In all, the AAP bagged 69 seats in elections to various local municipal bodies that year, which was quite an accomplishment as this was an alien electoral land for the party.

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The Congress put up its best performance in decades in the 2017 elections but could not build on it for the future. Following a no-bolds-barred campaign by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who then became the president of the party, the Congress won 77 seats and the BJP 99. Mr. Gandhi spent at least three days in all the four regions of Gujarat. His campaign was unprecedented because it was the first time that anyone from the Gandhi family had spent so many days here.

Mr. Gandhi raised several burning issues — unemployment, demonetisation, the pangs of the newly introduced Goods and Services Tax, crony capitalism, and the deteriorating state of agriculture. The Congress had the support of young turks such as Hardik Patel (Patidar), Alpesh Thakore (Other Backward Classes member) and Jignesh Mevani (a Dalit). It was an unprecedented situation as members of all the three castes came together on one platform. But the Congress could not retain them with the due importance they deserved and so, Mr. Patel and Mr. Thakore quit the party to join the BJP; they are now MLAs. Many leaders have since deserted the Congress, but the party does not seem to have tried hard to stop anyone nor applied any corrective measures to halt this trend.

Mr. Gandhi visited Gujarat after the 2024 general elections and announced in a spirited vein that his party would form the government in 2027. In another visit, he mocked his own party leaders saying, “Congress has two types of horses: those used in weddings and those in battles. But we assign the wrong duties to them.” He added that there were Trojan horses in his party who were hand in glove with the BJP and asserted that they would be purged. He promised to infuse fresh young blood in the party’s Gujarat leadership. No such thing has happened yet. In fact, Gujarat Congress president Shaktisinh Gohil resigned after the by-election results.

Also Read | Assembly bypolls: Gujarat Congress chief Shaktisinh Gohil resigns after party loses both seats

A common argument is that a third front has not succeeded in Gujarat, but the Congress seldom notices that this was only because there was always a proper Opposition party in place all these decades. All the major third fronts have been splinters of the Congress and the BJP and were seen as opportunistic groupings. As against this, the AAP is an independent political dispensation looking to spread its tentacles and has announced that it will contest the next Assembly polls on its own.

Darshan Desai is Professor-in-Practice, Journalism and Mass Communication, Navrachana University, Vadodara, and a senior Gujarat-based journalist