A Model On A Rampage

Rural communities went against the Bharatiya Janata Party in the recent Gujarat elections. Resentment among rural communities has been brewing since 2002 due to agrarian crisis. But it was for the first time that the Gujarat Model was put to test.

- Kundan Pandey

BY THE end of May 2014, Gujarat had stopped being a living state. It assumed an identity—almost reaching mythical levels—called the “Gujarat Model”. It fuelled over 800 million voters’ aspiration, cutting across the rural and urban segments. Expectedly, this ensured India’s first post-independence born Prime Minister Narendra Modi storming Parliament with a historic win. For each of those 300 plus Members of Parliament from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP or the NDA alliance) elected to the Lok Sabha in 2014, the “Gujarat Model” was the ticket to victory. Modi became the mascot of development. He was the chief minister of the state by then for 17 years. In a sample of 100 speeches he made during the election campaigns, “Gujarat Model” appeared around 700 times.

Cut to December 2017. BJP won its sixth consecutive state election. But in its victory, ironically, the dream run of the “Gujarat Model” got a rude reality check. The election saw both the ruling and the opposition parties claim victory. But the real story was in the details of how the state’s voters voted the BJP for its slimmest number of seats in over 22 years. Gujarat elections were more about the state’s precipitating rural distress than the electoral fortune of a ruling party. Close to 50 per cent of the voters in 2017 under the age of 34 years have not seen or voted a Non-BJP government. Thus the narrow victory of the ruling party that used to be also backed by rural voters is a development demarche on the “Gujarat Model”.

POLITICS OF WATER