OPINION

There is no way that the BJP could have afforded to lose the assembly polls in Gujarat. Nobody understood this better than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Despite the party ruling the roost in the state for the past three decades, the opposition Congress has maintained a fair share of votes all the while. Therefore when he bequeathed the office of the chief minister for job at South Block in the national Capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed his most trusted lieutenant as head of the party.
Given his training as Pracharak (fulltime volunteer) with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and exposure as organizing secretary of the party at the different levels, Modi understood well that his “transformational agenda” would invite sharp reactions and also a level of disenchantment among the voters, and would cause a mid-term crisis for his government.
This midterm crisis would have got further accentuated if its effects not arrested in Gujarat and the Congress not stopped in its tracks. Thus the unprecedented mobilization of party machinery and resources by Amit Shah; best reflected in Yogi Adityanath, the chief of minister of nation’s most populous state spending near fortnight campaigning in the western state.

The elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh are over, but not without leaving a trail of charges of manipulation of the poll process. The Congress party has been vociferously complaining about the wrongs committed by the EVMs against it.
This has come more in the wake of publication of the Exit polls predicting a complete rout of the party in Himachal and also a poor performance in Gujarat where it pooled all its resources, financial and human to win the electoral battle. Strangely, the party has not raised similar voice in the case of Himachal where it is being shown as a complete failure as an electoral machine.
 The Election Commission agreeing to its earlier demand that VVPAT based EVMs should be used does not cut much ice with it now. It went to the extent of knocking the doors of the Supreme Court with a demand that VVPAT votes should be matched with EVM votes to which the judiciary refused. At the same time, it mobilized a demonstration at the premises of the election commission leveling charges of bias and partiality against the Congress to make BJP win the elections in Gujarat. It used foul language against a constitutional authority to discred the institution in the eyes of the public. It said that chief election commissioner was acting like the PS to Narendra Modi or it was a captive puppet of the BJP.

We are in the midst of a very crucial battle of ballot being fought in the political significant western state of Gujarat. The protagonist of the battle, Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot afford to lose here for that would impair his image of remaining unbeatable in his home turf. The first round of polling is over. Another round remains.

Gujarat Model
The Prime Minister has won three legislative assembly polls here as Chief Minister and the one before that as party’s chief strategist. During the 23 years that he ruled Gujarat as the chief minister, he assiduously built his image of a development-oriented administrator. This was necessary for his larger political ambitions at the national stage, to counter his doppelgänger as a votary of Hindutva.

Ever since the party faced defeat in the national polls in 2009 under veteran Lal Krishna Advani, Modi quietly started to build on his ambitions. And this could not have been done merely on the basis of his strong Hinduvta image.

A few weeks back in these very columns, at the height of debate on Vikas (development) agenda, your reporter had penned that it was only matter of time when the “Hindu issues” could come to take the centrestage. The tone and tenor of the election campaign in the past week has shown that characters like Aurangzeb and themes like sacred thread are dominating the script.

 While the attempt from the Congress is to stop polarisation of votes on communal lines, the BJP is finding the new avatar of the rival quite amusing.Development is something on which Prime Minister Narendra Modi rode to power at the Centre in 2014. Development is something about which he talked about at the beginning of both the 2007 and 2012 assembly poll campaigns in Gujarat. But subsequently, the narrative on both the occasions turned towards communal polarisation.
Communal divide helps BJP no-end, something which has been proven time and again. In the past few years, the poll strategists from the saffron camp have managed to win a crucial battle of perceptions. They have succeeded in getting the attempts of their rivals to woo minority votes painted as “anti-Hindu” agenda.

The Bolsheviks were a revolutionary party, committed to the ideas of Karl Marx.  They believed that workers will unite and liberate themselves from the economic and political control of the ruling classes.  A year after seizing power Vladimir Ilych Lenin changed the name from Bolshevism to Communism.  When we analyse the ideological evolution after hundred years of Bolshevik Revolution, we find that Communism gained momentum during 1914-60, and captured the hearts of idealists across the globe.  The two world wars and a Great Depression doomed capitalism and communism seemed to be the obvious alternative.

But, soon communism lost its charm because of mass oppression, starvation, mass murder, genocide and terror.  These incidents challenged the foundations of human mankind.  Moreover, the struggle in Soviet Union, Mao Zedong China, Mengistu Haile Mariam Ethiopia, Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, were millions of human were killed by the agents of an oppressive totalitarian system aiming for total control and the elimination of the oppositions.  Many more deaths were due to communist generated mass famines in Stalin’s Great Famine in Ukraine, Mao’s China and modern day North Korea.Many more died in the last century fighting to keep their countries free from communism in places like Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia, Greece, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola and Russia itself.