Prime Minister Narendra Modi voted in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad today. And afterwards, typical of this warfare minded campaign, he said that the voter ID is more powerful than IED. This state delivers 26 seats to the Lok Sabha but its symbolic weight is more because it is Modi’s storied home turf. No doubt BJP once again has the lead here but the question is whether it can repeat the clean sweep of 2014. With big losses projected at the hands of the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh, every seat elsewhere is that much more precious for the saffron party.
In the 2017 assembly elections Congress saw a major revival in vote share and scored the highest number of seats it had seen here since 1985. Of course these are national elections and voters factor that in, so the Modi card may again swing it all. But a lot of discontent about scarcity of jobs and scarcity of water for irrigation has been reported. Indeed it was Congress’s performance in rural areas that catapulted its comeback in 2017. Overall for the opposition to topple the BJP government at the Centre, respectable performance in states like this is necessary.
One Gujarat seat that BJP considers already locked is Gandhinagar, where party president Amit Shah is making his debut. The talk here is only whether his victory margin will set a new record.
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