Gujarat is going to decide a key question ever since Aam Aadmi Party and Arvind Kejriwal have exploded on the national political scene of India - whether BJP and AAP have same support base?
In effect, it means whether a voter who votes for Kejriwal’s party at the state level also votes for PM Modi at the national level?
AAP twice humbled BJP in Delhi assembly elections in 2015 and 2020 but it also similarly got humbled in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019 in the national capital.
BJP won all seven Lok Sabha seats on offer in Delhi in 2014 and 2019 but voters gave a brute majority to Kejriwal in the assembly elections held the next year both times - 2015 and 2020. Both the parties were in a direct fight in Delhi, unlike in Punjab where AAP won four Lok Sabha seats in 2014 and one in 2019 in the border state, BJP is playing in the minor league.
The explanation that has been given so far with regard to AAP’s inexplicable poor performance in Delhi in Lok Sabha elections twice is that Kejriwal’s voter in the assembly election chooses Modi and BJP when it comes to Lok Sabha elections to a variable degree of course.
Now, slowly but surely a contest is building in Himachal and Gujarat, where buoyed with its stupendous Punjab success, the Aam Aadmi Party and its supreme leader Arvind Kejriwal have started making fresh efforts to woo voters ahead of the assembly elections slated to be held there at the end of this year.
Both Gujarat and Himachal are key states for BJP as the party is not only in power there but these are home states of its top guns - Gujarat is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah and Himachal is the home state of party’s national chief JP Nadda.
Kejriwal and Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann are slated to hold a roadshow in Mandi, the home district of Himachal CM Jairam Thakur, on April 6. A similar show, Tiranga Yatra, is being planned in the Gujarat capital Ahmedabad too by the duo in the first week of April only.
AAP has made its intentions clear with regard to both Himachal and Gujarat. As of now, AAP is a fringe player in Gujarat and as far as Himachal is concerned, it will only be testing waters there. But with Congress’s vote share looking increasingly shaky everywhere, the consensus among political observers is that AAP is going to be the biggest gainer when Congress’ traditional vote bank will seek a new house in the coming months.
And thus, especially in Gujarat, we might be able to find an answer to the question as to whether Modi and Kejriwal share the same support base as AAP will be pitted against Modi in his home state.
For the record, AAP got 0.1% vote share in 2017 elections vs BJP's massive 49.1% and Congress' 41.4% vote share.
It doesn’t matter who is the chief minister of Gujarat, the onus will always be on Modi to bring the party back in power again beating decades of anti-incumbency. It will always be in Modi’s name BJP is going to seek votes in Gujarat.
And the voters who like Kejriwal’s AAP at the state level and Modi’s BJP at the national level will have to make their choice clear now as Kejriwal will be seeking vote directly against Modi in Gujarat. So we don’t have to wait till 2024 to get the answer to the question about overlapping support base of Kejriwal and Modi. Gujarat can let us know by the end of the year.
And the answer to this question will have a direct bearing on the 2024 general elections.