BJP in contemporary times has settled as the major political force ahead of any parties across the length and breadth of the country and all of this hasn’t come eventually.
Established in 1980 the RSS’s political brain child has come a long way and saw the iconic leaders in Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani, but in the wake of the 2014 Lok Sabha election party’s Gujarat CM Narendra Modi emerged as a major force and went on to script history in the general election consecutively by securing an absolute majority alone in 2014 and then in 2019.
The people of Gujarat are set to vote in the two-phase beginning on December 1 and the second on December 5th while the result is scheduled to announce on the 8th of this month.
Meanwhile, RSS has gotten active this time, probably more than ever, and at the center is PM Modi’s paternal village Vadnagar’s constituency of Unjha, and significantly most crucial in the entire 182-member Gujarat Assembly.
Back in 2017, the Unjha assembly lost the grip of the BJP and came into the congress’s bloc for the first time since 1972. It was not just this, BJP suffered a major blow in that assembly election and was restricted to less than 100 seats in the state in the backdrop of the major backlash which came in the Patidar protest.
Dr. Asha Patel from Congress defeated BJP’s 4-time MLA from the seat Narayanbhai Lalludas Patel by a margin of 19,529. The political pundits when figuring out found two prominent reasons behind the loss of the BJP’s candidate.
The first being Patidar’s protest and the second was the electorate’s anti-incumbency against Narayanbhai Patel. However, Dr. Asha Patel joined BJP in 2019 alongside many Congress leaders who defected to BJP raising the party’s number in the assembly to 111.
Meet Pratibha Singh, Himachal PCC chief and sitting Lok Sabha MP among Congress’s top CM contenders
But, she later died in 2021 after being diagnosed with Dengue and since then the seat has remained vacant. RSS doesn’t want to take any chance this time as this is the most crucial in multiple regards.
Even though the Patidar leader Hardik Patel who spearheaded the Patidar protest in 2017 is now BJP’s official candidate, RSS is doing all it can to get it to its holds and has fielded Kirtibhai Keshavlal Patel who is said to be a close aide of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.
The BJP and RSS workers are not just proactive in the constituency but are planning and proceeding with their campaigning under a well-laid-down strategy.
To the face of people, it was Gujarat’s model spearheaded by Narendra Modi and of course, Hindutva’s agenda has always been there. Gujarat has been BJP’s fort from where it went on to extend its reach in the rest of the country precisely in the second decade of the 21st century.
And when it comes to Unjha BJP and RSS will do all they can to get it back as it is the paternal village of their greatest poster boy ever PM Modi himself.
With time around it seems easy for BJP to retain the state to their hold, the boiling issues can significantly play a major role in the upcoming election, however, the case won’t be the same as it was back in 2017.