AAP opens Gujarat campaign with roadshow, to name 21 candidates this week

The Aam Aadmi Party has changed its mind on the Gujarat election and will declare candidates for 21 seats this week. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah’s home state is expected to go to the polls in December.

The AAP would launch its election campaign with a roadshow on Monday afternoon in Ahmedabad to mark Gandhi Jayanti, leaders of the party’s state unit said.

“The roadshow will start from Naroda in Ahmedabad and end at Gandhi statue at the Ashram Road,” Harshil Nayak of the AAP’s Gujarat unit told Hindustan Times of Sunday.

Monday is the 148th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi who was born in Porbandar, a coastal town in Gujarat.

The first stop for the roadshow, led by AAP’s state in-charge Gopal Rai, would be Naroda Patiya, an Ahmedabad suburb that saw the worst violence during the communal riots that swept the state in 2002.

Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati Ashram is from where Gandhi launched the Dandi march, or the salt satyagrah, a landmark event in India’s struggle for independence.

The party would declare its first list of 21 candidates after the roadshow, AAP’s Gujarat election committee chief Kishore Desai said, without specifying a date.

He also didn’t say how many candidates the AAP would field for the 182-member assembly but sources in Delhi said the decision would depend on the response the first few days of the campaigning would draw.

The AAP is looking to corner the ruling BJP on the anti-corruption plank and has come up with a slogan, “Bhajpa hatao, parivartan lao (remove BJP, bring in change).”

Gujarat was central to the Delhi’s ruling party’s plan to go national. But its poor showing in Goa and a below expectation performance in Punjab assembly elections in February-March followed by humiliation in May’s civic polls in Delhi forced the party to drop the plan of a grand campaign in the western state.

At one point, the leadership even decided not to contest the Gujarat election but gave into the state unit.

The party brass decided to focus on Delhi and consolidating position as the main opposition party in Punjab but the recent win in an assembly byelection in the Capital seems to have lifted the mood.

“Volunteers felt that they had been working for four years on building the party in Gujarat and the party must fight the election,” an AAP leader said.

The BJP, in power in Gujarat for almost 22 years, faces anti-incumbency and anger from the powerful Patidar community seeking quota in colleges and jobs.

The AAP is keeping a close watch on the community, which is also being wooed by the Congress that has been out of power in the state since 1995.