Ruling out early elections in Gujarat, BJP president Amit Shah on Monday exhorted party workers to prepare for the Assembly polls due in November and aim at winning 150 seats in the State.
In his first public rally in his home State after the BJP’s landslide win in the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Assembly polls, Mr. Shah said that “people of Gujarat have not forgotten Badshah and Begum rule in Ahmedabad during the Congress regimes before 1995” indicating that development-plus-Hindutva will be the basic theme of the party’s election campaign.
“Today, the BJP has 352 MPs in both Houses, 1385 MLAs in the country and ruling 15 States — which means 65 % of the country’s geography and 59 % of the population. But let’s not forget that the BJP’s victory marchstarted from Gujarat’s development model,” Mr. Shah said.
According to him, the BJP had won 127 seats in the 2002 Assembly polls when Narendra Modi was Chief Minister and in 2017, the party will win 150 seats when Mr. Modi is the Prime Minister.
Mr. Shah slammed the Congress, asking its leaders to stop daydreaming of coming to power in the State and stressed that the previous Congress regimes were marred by “casteism, communalism and corruption.”
Wednesday’s rally on Sabarmati Riverfront ground in Ahmedabad was the first public rally addressed by Mr. Shah in Gujarat after last year’s fiasco when Hardik Patel’s supporters in Surat had disrupted a convention, forcing the BJP president and others to curtail their speeches and leave the venue in August 2016.
In power since 1998, BJP faces not only the anti-incumbency factor
