Modi: King of Gujarat

 Gujarat wants Modi. His winning of Gujarat Assembly elections added fuel to all (media, Congress and of course to BJP). Here is a look, how he done election campaign in 2012.

Tireless Campaigner

Modi addressed 250 rallies and reached out to 180 more locations through 3D projections. Sonia Gandhi addressed 7 and Rahul Gandhi 8 election meetings

Sweeps Urban Seats

Delimitation increased urban seats. BJP won 12 of 16 seats in Ahmedabad, all 12 in Surat, and all 5 in Vadodara

Safely Home

Modi was perturbed by the surging crowds of women a few months back when the Congress started distributing lakhs of forms to the homeless, promising them subsidized housing. But the results in seats with mainly poor neighbourhoods show the Congress was building castles in the air

Sad-Bhavana

The last assembly had 5 Muslim MLAs, the new one will have only two, both from Cong. The BJP didn’t give a ticket to any Muslim but it won most of the Muslim votes.

Turnout Works

The unusually high voter turnout of 71.9% was the key to the BJPs big win. This was almost 10% higher than in the previous two assembly polls. Modi told voters to come out and vote for him, not the candidates. The personality cult worked

Caste Contours Change

Call it social engineering, Modi style. With Leuva Patels swinging away from the BJP, especially under Keshubhai’s influence in Saurashtra, the OBCs consolidated around the BJP. This was seen as a reaction to the ganging up of the dominant Patels in the countryside

Exchange Programme

Cong, BJP wrested 30 seats from each other. Cong gained in Saurashtra & N Gujarat, conceded seats to BJP in central and S Gujarat.5 ministers lost their seats, but so did Guj Cong president Arjun Modhwadia

Batting Failure

Armed with a bat as an election symbol,84-year-old Keshubhai padded up for a match with Modi but flattered to deceive. He retired hurt, scoring only two but managed to inflict some body blows in Saurashtra where the BJP slipped by nine seats

Bharuch Breached

The Congress won no seat in Bharuch district, home turf of Sonia’s political secretary Ahmed Patel. Of the five seats, the BJP won four and the JD(U) one. Modi targeted Patel by calling him Ahmed Miyan Patel and mischievously claiming he was the Congress CM candidate

Pro-Incumbency

Modi’s strategy every time he faced an election was to drop most of the candidates a good way to fight anti-incumbency at the local level. As the rejects would have switched over to Keshubhai, he decided to repeat most of the candidates and coined the word pro-incumbency

Modi is the 13th politician to serve at least 3 consecutive terms as CM.

Including him, there are 6 such CMs serving at present, including Tarun Gogoi (Assam), Naveen Patnaik (Odisha), Okram Ibobi Singh (Manipur),Manik Sarkar (Tripura) & Sheila Dikshit (Delhi)

Gujarat is one of 7 states where Cong has been out of power for at least 20 years.

The others are Bihar, Sikkim, Tripura, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal (barring a brief stint as junior coalition partner with Trinamool).These 7 states together account for 230 Lok Sabha seats