Gujarat Election 2022: Why Congress faces its toughest battle ever
Even though the state Congress unit is confident that the people will spokesperson will vote for the party as they are fed up of the BJP's "misrule" for over two decades, political observers believe that the Congress is plagued by infighting and lack of strong local leaders.
FollowUnlike previous elections, the Congress party is this facing one of its toughest electoral battles in Gujarat this time as it attempts not just to dislodge the ruling BJP government in the state but also tries to prevent its votes from getting split by new entrants like the Aam Aadmi Party and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.
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Even though the state Congress unit is confident that the people will spokesperson will vote for the party as they are fed up of the BJP's "misrule" for over two decades, political observers believe that the Congress is plagued by infighting and lack of strong local leaders.
Rajkot-based political observer Suresh Samani told news agency PTI that the 2022 election would be one of the toughest for the Congress. To note, the Congress party has not won the state assembly polls since 1995.
The Congress party has secured 77 seats in the 182-member assembly in the 2017 elections, largely due to rural distress. The BJP won 99 seats.
"The farming community was unhappy as it was not earning a good price for crop produce. However, in the last five years, the BJP government paid a reasonably good return as the Minimum Support Price (MSP) and bought every farm produce, including commercial crops like groundnut. The rural population now has nothing to complain about," Samani said.
Also, despite the rising inflation, the BJP has the support of the urban middle class and higher middle-class voters owing to various reasons, including Hindutva. So, the Congress is unlikely to make inroads into the urban areas, the political expert said.
Besides, the fact that several of its strong leaders have crossed over to the BJP in the last five years has seen the Congress support eroding in its strongholds of north Gujarat and some parts of the tribal region.
Another challenge that the Congress party faces is that its traditional vote bank is being targeted by contenders like Arvind Kejriwal's AAP and Asaduddin Owaisi's AIMIM. Both the parties have been projecting the Congress as a spent force and appealing to voters in their rallies not to waste votes on the grand old party.
The Bharatiya Tribal Party of Chotu Vasava has joined hands with the AAP. This could reduce the Congress votes in tribal areas. Owaisi's party is aggressively wooing the minority segment. Owaisi has been traversing through Muslim-dominated areas in Ahmedabad and Vadgam in north Gujarat and in Kutch.
Another political observer, Hari Desai, advised that the Congress would do better if it stuck to its KHAM -- Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi (tribal) and Muslim -- vote bank and get votes of the disgruntled Patel community members. Former Gujarat chief minister Madhavsinh Solanki had used the KHAM combination as a winning formula, he recalled.
Desai was of the view that parties like the AAP and the BTP could harm the BJP votes equally as it would for Congress.
Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi said that the party had devised a strategy to make this election a fight against Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel and BJP state unit president C R Patil. According to Doshi, the party's central leadership is observing everything minutely and giving directions to the state unit.
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