AAP’s Bitter Revdi?

By championing freebies, Kejriwal may have eased BJP’s path to a comfortable win in Gujarat

- Asim Ali

In the last Gujarat election, the decisive intervention from PM Modi came only in the final throes of campaigning, to reverse a Congress surge. This time around, the decisive intervention seems to have been made long before the poll bugle was sounded. The freebies debate, started by Modi, and latched on to by Kejriwal, has ended up slicing the opposition right down the middle, and likely cleared the way for a comfortable BJP victory.

Before explaining the point, let’s quickly glance through the electoral picture painted by the latest Lokniti-CSDS survey.

● BJP appears to have held on to its near majority support.

● Congress and AAP are barely managing to cross 20% vote share.

● In a first-past-the-post system, this kind of voter break-up usually means a landslide, in this case for BJP.

● The reason AAP’s advances into Gujarat have cut Congress into half, while leaving BJP’s support base largely untouched, is clear from the survey data.

● The vast majority of AAP votes are coming from traditional Congress constituencies: the backward communities (Kolis, Dalits, tribals, Muslims) along with poorer sections of electorate. AAP in Gujarat therefore seems less effective than it was in Delhi and Punjab, where it cannibalised the support base of both established parties, not just a single party.

● Why has there been no signs of the emergence of an umbrella AAP coalition in Gujarat?

● Why has AAP failed so far to make any significant inroads into the constituencies loyal to BJP? These include not just upper castes and Patidars, but also a large middle-class constituency.