India’s ruling BJP set for landslide victory in Modi’s home state

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) registered a landslide victory in prime minister Narendra Modi’s home state Gujarat where it has secured a record seventh term in power.

The record win in Gujarat is a big boost to the BJP ahead of the national elections in 2024.

The western state has been a BJP bastion since 1995, where Mr Modi himself remained chief minister for two terms before being elected as prime minister for the first time in 2014.

The party secured a record 157 seats out of the total 182 in the state polls, as results were counted on Thursday.

The results also brought down the Congress party, which ruled India for nearly seven decades, to its lowest tally, with just 16 seats in the state assembly.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is steadily emerging as the principal national opposition in the country with the slow decimation of the Congress, also managed to win only a handful of seats.

While the party had been looking to make inroads into Gujarat after its win in Punjab in March, it won only five seats.

On Wednesday, the party ousted the BJP from the municipal body polls in capital Delhi, over which the Hindu nationalist party held guard for 15 years.

In the 2017 elections, the BJP won 99 seats in Gujarat and the Congress 77 seats, while three went to other parties and another three to independents.

Thursday’s victory is the largest by any party in Gujarat, with the BJP breaking the Congress’s 1985 record of winning 149 seats.

The BJP powered through its victory by riding on Mr Modi’s image despite anger stemming from large-scale unemployment after the devastating second wave of the Covid pandemic last summer.

In a statement on Twitter, federal home minister Amit Shah, Mr Modi’s trusted aide who served alongside him in the Gujarat state government, credited the BJP’s victory to the prime minister.

“Gujarat has given an unprecedented mandate to @narendramodi ji’s BJP, which has become the character of development and public welfare by rejecting those who do politics of hollow promises, revelry and appeasement,” Mr Shah wrote on Twitter.

The party also took home the assembly seat from the site of last month’s tragic bridge collapse in Morbi, where over 130 people had died.

The BJP’s candidate Kantilal Amrutiya, a five-time lawmaker, won the seat by 62,000 votes over his Congress rival Jayantilal Patel.

The BJP was also leading in 12 of 17 seats with a high Muslim population, despite not fielding a single Muslim candidate in the elections, reported NDTV.

The state saw one of the worst communal riots in independent India in 2002, when over 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed when Mr Modi was chief minister.

Gujarat’s sitting chief minister Bhupendra Patel will take oath for a second term on 12 December.

While the BJP scored big on its home turf of Gujarat, it lost to the Congress in the northern hill-state of Himachal Pradesh, where the two parties have alternated in power since 1982.

The BJP was looking to return to power in the state to bolster its chances ahead of the 2024 elections, but results showed the Congress had won 39 of 68 seats on Thursday.

While the AAP failed to register its presence in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, the party celebrated its transition to the status of a national political party from a regional player.