Japan K Pathak , Gandhinagar :The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the year 2017 assembly election in Gujarat with the lowest number of seats ever – just 99. However various election results post that show that BJP improved its situation post-2017 significantly in Gujarat. The party now has 111 seats in the State assembly. The extra number of seats have been won through some 20 Assembly By-Polls.

In 2018, then Congress MLA Kunvarjibhai Bavalia resigned as MLA from Jasdan seat. Bavalia is a prominent Koli leader. He was heading the national outfit of Koli community. Koli community has an influence on dozens of assembly seats in Gujarat. The BJP inducted Bavaliya and made him victorious in the by-poll. This by-poll win was significant for BJP as it broke several impressions that were established in the minds of the people in light of the 2017 results. The Jasdan win broke the impression that turncoats who join BJP can’t win the polls. It also demolished the arguments such as BJP is weak in the Saurashtra region, BJP is weak in rural areas, Patels would not vote for BJP’s Koli candidate, infighting in BJP can spoil its chances, and more. Bavaliya had won by nearly 20,000 votes. Post-2017 Gujarat election, Jasdan win was an important milestone that boost the morale of BJP cadres and reinjected confidence.

In 2019, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, four more Congress MLAs – Asha Patel, Jawahar Chavda, Raghavji Patel, and Parshottam Sabariya resigned and joined BJP. The by-polls were held alongside the Lok Sabha election. All four – Ashaben, Raghavji, Jawahar Chavda, and Sabariya were victorious. Chavda from the Aahir community was an important catch as he holds significant influence in the rural Junagadh district. Jawahar’s father Pethalji Chavda was a prominent Congress leader. Ashaben also was an important catch as she was representing the seat which has a very large and majority presence of the Kadva Patidar community.

Ashaben and Raghavjibhai’s decision to join BJP and their victory in by-polls quite erased the impression created after the results of the 2017 polls, that Patidar community voters were largely upset with BJP on a permanent basis due to the year 2015 quota agitation and related violence. In fact the year 2019 Lok Sabha results in Gujarat also cleared the air. BJP enjoyed the upper hand over the rival Congress party in 173 of the total 182 assembly seats. All communities voted for BJP. Majority of the nine seats where Congress enjoyed the upper hand had the presence of Muslims and tribal (including converted Christians). BJP nevertheless won all 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat for the second time.

As some BJP MLAs won in Lok Sabha election, they resigned from the State assembly. This caused by-polls of Amraiwadi, Kheralu, Lunawada, and Tharad assembly seats. In addition to this, two Congress MLAs Alpesh Thakor and Dhavalsinh Zala tendered resignations from the State Assembly and also from the Congress party, and joined BJP. This caused by-polls in Radhanpur and Bayad assembly seats. Overconfident after earlier by-poll victories and a grand Lok Sabha victory, Gujarat BJP took these six seats by-polls lightly. The party managed to win three seats but lost the other three. The party lost Tharad seat for the first time. The party had inducted Alpesh Thakor and Dhavalsinh, believing that Thakor community voters would make them win and come to the BJP fold. However, both of them lost the by-polls. Dhavalsinh lost by less than 1,000 votes. For Alpesh this setback was bigger. Amraiwadi seat in urban Ahmedabad witnessed very low voter turnout. The party candidate here won in the last round of counting. In all earlier rounds of counting, Congress was ahead of BJP. Amraiwadi is the seat neighboring Maninagar, the constituency represented by former Chief Minister Narendrabhai Modi. In fact, Narendrabhai had been the booth in-charge at one of the booth in the Amraiwadi assembly seat. Low turnout and victory by merely some around 5,000 votes in Amraiwadi, the first-ever defeat in Tharad and the defeats in Radhanpur and Bayad alarmed the Delhi leadership of the party. The State BJP organization and the State government leadership passed the blame on each other. This was the turning point. Prime Minister Narendrabhai might have decided to make drastic changes in the State party organization and in the State government after this fifty-fifty percent result in six-seat by-polls in October 2019.

So in July 2020, CR Patil, Navsari Lok Sabha member and close aide of Prime Minister Narendrabhai Modi was made the State BJP chief. Patil is the can-do person for Modi. He has been winning the Navsari Lok Sabha seat with the highest margin. The first challenge for Patil was the 8-seat assembly by-polls. These seats had gone vacant as then-sitting Congress MLAs had resigned ahead of the Rajya Sabha election in June 2020. Five of them had joined BJP and they were fielded as BJP candidates. Interestingly the BJP had lost all these seats in the regular election of 2017. But now in November 2020 results, it won all of them. Political pandits would believe that BJP would win five seats, at the maximum six seats, but none had thought that BJP would win all eight seats. Then the margins were unusual. BJP won Kaprada seat by a margin of over 40,000 votes. BJP had lost this same seat by a margin of fewer than 500 votes three years back. BJP won Dang’s seat by a margin of over 60,000 votes. The party had lost this seat in 2017 by a margin of fewer than 1,000 votes. The 8 seats were located in different regions. They had different flavors of castes and communities. They were rural and semi-urban seats. This grand victory further injected confidence into BJP cadres which were somewhat shaken after a fifty-fifty percent result in the year 2019. In 2021, Gujarat witnessed another assembly seat by-poll on the Morva Hadaf seat. BJP was minus 4,336 here in 2017 and 45,000 plus in by-poll in terms of votes.

So all in all, between the regular elections of 2017 and 2022, Gujarat witnessed 20 by-polls of assembly seats of which 17 were won by the BJP, while three were by Congress. BJP lifted its tally up from 99 to 111 in five years in the State assembly. Even the results of three by-polls that the BJP lost showed a rise in votes for BJP. In Bayad by-poll BJP reduced its margin of loss from 7900 in 2017 to 743 in 2019. In Radhanpur BJP reduced its margin of loss from 14,857 in 2017 to 3,807 in 2019. The loss of Tharad was however a setback. A lesser margin than in 2017 in the Amraiwadi seat was linked to lesser voter turnout. However, that too was a setback. Barring Tharad and Amraiwadi, BJP had all good news in all by-polls.

This continuous march of victories, rather grand victories is the reason why BJP is more confident, and the people perceive it as the party that enjoys the upper hand in upcoming State assembly polls. DeshGujarat