POLL RESULTS WILL IMPACT BJP PREPARATIONS IN MP

‘Gujarat, Himachal results have made it clear that anti-incumbency can be turned into pro-incumbency by giving a new look to the team that works for the party’.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

The result of the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh polls are going to make an impact in Madhya Pradesh where elections are due less than a year away. The ruling BJP, which has been in power in the state since December 2003, except for a brief period from December 2018 till March 2020, when the Congress was in power, will be repeating the Gujarat model of executing widespread changes in Madhya Pradesh.

In Gujarat, the party decided to drop more than 40 of its sitting MLAs which included stalwart like outgoing Assembly Speaker Nimaben Acharya, Cabinet Ministers Pradip Parmar, Rajendra Trivedi, Bhupendra Singh Chudasama, Pardeep Singh Jadeja, Nitin Patel and former CM Vijay Rupani. The party had won 99 seats in the 2017 polls.

This decision, as the result showed on Thursday, gave high dividends, as the BJP for the first time in Gujarat's electoral history, crossed 150 seats in the 182 Assembly seat and went on to win 156 seats with a vote share of 52.50%.

The step to drop big names and more than 40 sitting MLAs was taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home minister Amit Shah with the sole reason of blunting the anti-incumbency that had come to be associated with the BJP because of the fact that it has been in power in the state for 27 years now.

The party even replaced former Chief Minister Vijay Rupani in September and appointed the incumbent Bhupendra Bhai Patel in a political move that caught even Rupani by surprise.

This too, party sources had told The Sunday Guardian at that time, was done to enter the upcoming elections without any "baggage". Rupani was accused by his detractors of failing to handle the pandemic as efficiently as the state government had the capability to.