ROUND two to Shankarsinh Vaghela. The Gujarat chief minister's victory in the Radhanpur bypoll, five months after he ousted the BJP government in the state, secures his position. But with state politics still in a flux, Vaghela can't afford to rest on his laurels.
The BJP was hoping to quash its most high-profile rebel once and for all, but it must now resign itself to Vaghela becoming a long-term bugbear. More than anything else, the party has lost face. In other circumstances, its performance would have been dubbed creditable: it polled 44,000 votes against 26,000 during the saffron wave of 1995. For a lightweight political novice like 27-year-old BJP nominee Shankarbhai Chaudhry to improve the tally, when pitted against a sitting chief minister, would normally have been regarded as commendable. Particularly in a constituency where the party has never won before.
But the VHP had upped the ante by billing the bypoll as nothing short of a dharmayudh and Radhanpur as dharmakshetra (battle-ground), where the traitorous Vaghela and his breakaway Rashtriya Janata Party (RJP) would get their come-uppance and the VHP its revenge for the arrest of its state leader, Praveen Togadia. As many as 25,000 workers flooded the constituency, giving the electoral battle a do-or-die flavour. Not surprisingly, the embarrassment of the BJP hardliners is out of proportion with the loss of this one assembly seat.
Former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, who was projected more aggressively than the official nominee during the campaign, explained the defeat by alleging misuse of state apparatus and intimidation of party workers. As did the BJP's chief strategist, Narendra Modi (recalled from Chandigarh expressly to orchestrate the BJP campaign).
Vaghela had the unstinting support of the Congress, for which arid Radhanpur had long been a pocketborough. Points out his chief advisor, Chimanbhai Shukla: "Radha-npur is one area in Gujarat where the RSS has never had a hold." Vaghela also benefi-ted from the 12,000-strong Muslim electorate, alienated from the Congress and desperately in search of a third force. The en bloc Muslim vote accounted for the bulk of Vag-hela's margin of 13,984. The aggressive use of Hindutva by the VHP helped consolidate that vote. The Muslim-Thakur-OBC combine visualised by Vaghela seems to have clicked.
While Shukla says the election proves the hollowness of the Hindutva strategy, Modi insists the poll results indicate no such thing. "Let's assume," he says, "that our candidate received all the Chaudhry votes on account of his caste, say 14,000. So where did the remaining votes come from?" But the fact that the BJP lost even in the urban segments, where Hindutva was expected to have the maximum impact, is an indication that the strategy did not work as well as expected. Nor did tactics like putting up dummy 'Vaghelas' to split the RJP vote. Star campaigners like Sushma Swaraj, Shatrughan Sinha, Sadhvi Rithambhara and Uma Bharati failed to do the trick. Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, although invited, stayed away, reportedly because of the internal differences in the state unit of the BJP.
For Vaghela, it is imperative to stabilise his government now and build up a grassroots organisational base. He has three options: forming a coalition with the Congress, splitting the BJP and/or splitting the Congress. He has already ruled out the fourth option of merging with the Congress, preferring to remain his own master (his electoral slogan was 'Janata meri high command hai'—the people are my high command).
He is treading cautiously vis-a-vis the Congress, publicly acknowledging his gratitude for the party's support in Radhanpur.
Aware that he will come under renewed pressure from the party on whose goodwill his government rests, he is unlikely to make any immediate effort to woo Congress MLAs amongst whom he has a considerable following—particularly in the Janata Dal(G) group. "We don't have a leader of Vaghela's stature," a tribal Congress MLA said. A fledgling in terms of organisational infrastructure, his party will have to come to an understanding with the Congress.
It is the BJP, already driven by internal dissension, that's immediately vulnerable. Already, there is apprehension of some MLAs changing loyalties. However, BJP leaders feel defections are more likely to be restricted to local bodies—not a mean loss, given that currently it has a stranglehold over them.
For the BJP, the lessons are two-fold. It must sink its differences and concentrate on shoring up its mass base in the state. Round three may not be far off.
