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No threat in sight to Advani

Manas Dasgupta

BJP leader is all set to win a fifth term from the Gujarat capital of Gandhinagar

PHOTO: AFP

L.K. Advani addresses BJP supporters in Gandhinagar prior to filing his nomination.

Gandhinagar is a keenly watched constituency even if there is a total lack of suspense about who will win it. No one believes that BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate L.K. Advani — who has won four times from here — can lose the contest.

There is little chance that well-known dancer Mallika Sarabhai, who is fighting as an Independent, will cause one of 2009’s biggest political upsets. The Congress, which doesn’t see more than an outside chance of regaining the seat, has nominated a local candidate to exploit on the “local versus outsider” issue.

Having represented Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha for the last 16 years, people do not regard Mr. Advani as an “outsider” any more. Ask any senior Congress leader, and they will tell you that Gandhinagar is not on the list of seats the party expects to win.

Delimitation has altered the contours of the constituency, with two key segments —Ellisbridge and Sarkhej — going elsewhere. They had voted solidly for Mr. Advani before; new areas, less pro-BJP have been added to the constituency.

In the last election, Mr. Advani won the seat with a margin of over 2.17 lakh votes, getting more than 61 per cent of the valid vote against the 35 per cent or so polled by his nearest Congress rival. The voting pattern has remained more or less similar in previous elections he has contested here. Ever since Shankarsinh Waghela, who then was in the BJP, won the Gandhinagar seat in 1989 and vacated it for Mr. Advani in 1991, the BJP never looked back. For the Congress, the constituency has become a laboratory for experimenting, without much success. The candidates put up by the Congress against Mr. Advani include the former Chief Election Commissioner, T. N. Seshan, Hindi film hero Rajesh Khanna, and the former State Director-General of Police, P. K. Datta.

The Congress candidate this time, Suresh Patel, a member of the State Assembly from Kalol, which has now been incorporated in the Gandhinagar constituency, is banking on the sizeable “Patel” vote, constituting nearly 25 per cent of the electorate. But “Patels” have traditionally backed the BJP. That they will switch loyalties because a Patel is in the fray is far from certain. The minority-dominated Juhapura, where the BJP is anathema, constitutes about seven per cent of the electorate. The votes here are likely to get divided between the Congress and Ms. Sarabhai.

Backed by the anti-BJP forces, including a section of the intellectuals and voluntary organisations working for the 2002 riot victims, the presence of Ms. Sarabhai is likely to make the Congress task more difficult, because every vote she polls will mean one less for the party.

Besides Kalol, where the Congress may take a lead in view of Mr. Patel’s popularity, the Gandhinagar Assembly segment may not go Mr. Advani’s way. The demolition of over 200 temples by the Modi administration in the name of removing “encroachments” in public places has angered Vishwa Hindu Parishad supporters. The sudden imposition of “conservancy tax” by the government on residents, ignoring strong public protests, have also upset voters. A joke doing the rounds in Gujarat is that Mr. Advani can be “defeated” in Gandhinagar only by the Chief Minister Narendra Modi. So long as Mr. Modi does not “sabotage” Mr. Advani’s chances, he is set to sail through.

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