Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to its sixth straight victory in Gujarat with an increased vote share (compared to the 2012 election), although the Congress, under its new president Rahul Gandhi, won the most seats it has in the state since 1985.
The BJP won 99 seats in the 182-member assembly, giving it a clear simple majority, and the Congress 77. “Development is Gujarat’s mantra, not division or dynasty,” Modi said in a speech to party workers on Monday evening in New Delhi. He termed the victory “extraordinary”.
It was also extraordinarily close.
The BJP won 15 of these and the Congress 13.
With initial trends showing an extremely close finish, Sensex, the benchmark index of BSE, opened lower and traded around 850 points down from Friday’s close before it became clear that the BJP would win Gujarat. The index closed 138 points up.
The victory was also the BJP’s narrowest in terms of vote share since it came to power in 1995. Its vote share was 49.1%, compared to the Congress’s 41.4%. In 2002 and 2007, the BJP won more of the votes cast, 49.85% and 49.12% respectively, but they translated into more seats, 127 and 117.
Ahead of the elections, the perception was that the BJP would be hurt by the coalition the Congress had built: with Patidars, who wanted reservations in jobs and colleges; other backward classes; and Dalits. There was also a belief that small businessmen in the state’s business belt, traditionally BJP voters, would desert the party because they had been hit by demonetisation and the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax. Finally, it was expected that the agrarian crisis in the state, largely the result of falling prices of cash crops (cotton and groundnut), would hurt the party.
As it turned out, only the last seemed to actually play out in the results, with the BJP winning only 19 of 48 seats in the Saurashtra region, where the agrarian crisis is most acute. The Congress won 28 seats here. In 2012, the BJP had won 30 of these seats and the Congress 15.
“One of the main reasons for the crisis in Gujarat’s agriculture, particularly Saurashtra, is that the terms of trade have moved decisively against agriculture in the past four years. This is a summary measure of farm incomes. Prices have crashed for a slew of cash crops like groundnut and even cotton,” said economist YK Alagh.
If the BJP still won, it was because of its hold over urban constituencies. It won 46 of the 56 urban constituencies in the state. That meant that it won only 53 of the 126 rural ones, low even for a party that has traditionally fared better in urban areas.