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Rasheeda Bhagat

VADODARA, Dec 8

WITH the Prime Minister, Mr A.B. Vajpayee's maiden election rally in Vadodara (Baroda) failing to capture the imagination of the voters of Gujarat and the Gandhinagar MP and the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr L.K. Advani too failing to muster large crowds at his election rallies, the battle of Gujarat, as far as the BJP is concerned, has to be fought on the lone shoulders of its strongman, Mr Narendra Modi.

So much so that the BJP General Secretary, Mr Arun Jaitley, has started talking about Mr Modi as the party's brand ambassador. "We are projecting the tough and uncompromising Mr Modi as the brand for these elections", he has said.

But when it comes to the Congress-I chief, Ms Sonia Gandhi, the crowds are huge and the party has jumped into the fray for the prestigious election with ample ammunition; the suave and soft-spoken Dr Manmohan Singh, talking about economic reforms which will benefit the ordinary man; Mr Ajit Jogi wooing the tribal voters, Mr S.M. Krishna from the IT capital of India (Bangalore), and Mr Ashok Gehlot trying to convince the voters along the Gujarat/Rajasthan border that Mr Modi's ideology of communal divide will eventually destroy the country.

The Congress is getting more than a helping hand from Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav, who held a sizeable audience enthralled at an Ahmedabad rally on Saturday night with his rustic charm, where enough potshots were taken at Mr Modi's Hindutva as well as his bachelor status. Even his arch rival and one-time constituent of the NDA Government, Mr Ram Vilas Paswan, is here to woo the Dalits on behalf of the Congress.

Asked to comment on the much better response Ms Sonia's meetings were getting in Gujarat, compared to the top BJP leaders', Dr Juzar S. Bandukwala, Professor of Physics at the Baroda University, whose house was ransacked and looted in the March riots, told Business Line, "The BJP and Mr Modi have been playing the communal card again and again, whipping up passion by using terms like Mian Musharraf and Islamic terrorism and trying to put the blame on the Muslim community.

They are focusing only on Godhra and have completely ignored the terrible sufferings of the Muslims during the riots. The saddest part is that both Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani have completely surrendered to Mr Modi and the NDA allies are paralysed proving that they are power hungry." But while " Mr Modi and his administration had taken a part in the horrible crimes against the Muslim community", the side effects of the communal carnage had strong economic implications, he said.

"The Muslims suffered initially, but the Hindus had also suffered a lot. They have suffered due to a complete slowdown in the economy. People are aware that hardly any development work has taken place since Mr Modi took over, and you can see the effects in terms of what has happened to the financial and economic indices. There is high unemployment, many co-operative banks have collapsed and many people have lost their lifetime saving in this scam. All this has hurt the BJP core constituency..., which is the middle class, especially the traders. Many traders, as you know, have committed suicide in the last few months".

He said many of these traders had set up their business establishments on loans taken from banks and these were based on projections of robust turnover. But the communal riots resulted in huge losses for such people, and "you can say that during March and April, the Gujarat economy was at a standstill and that destroyed a large number of Hindu businessmen. The Muslim businesses, as is well known, were already destroyed. But when people stopped shopping, mainly in the big cities, Hindu businesses also collapsed."

So will the average Hindu, on the voting day, be swayed by the BJP's Hindutva campaign, or will he think about his own future and the impact on his livelihood if Gujarat continues to be a divided society?

Prof. Bandukwala says that this is the crucial question and the average Hindu voter's response to it will determine the shape and colour of the next government here. "Will he look at this election from the point of Musharraf and terrorism or his own future? I think self-interest will predominate. And there is another vital angle too to this `self-interest'. If Mr Modi comes back to power, we Muslims reserve the right to self-defence. We will never ever allow what happened to our women and children to recur again. To that extent, we don't trust the police at all. All the senior IPS and IAS officers have been a shame on their cadres. Now, we will be very vigilant, and if worse comes to worse, we will reserve the right to self-defence. And the Hindus know this very well."

To this correspondent's interaction with several university students and those training as teachers in Anand where these youngsters were spewing poison on "Islamic terrorists" and warning Muslims to behave, obviously inspired by the Modi/Praveen Togadia rhetoric, Prof Bandukwala said, "Most of the youngsters who are rooting for Mr Modi are those without jobs or without prospects of jobs as there is massive unemployment."

He pointed out that while factors like globalisation also were operating to add to the number of the unemployed, the unskilled and semi-skilled workers were the prime targets of Mr Modi. "It is very sad that the younger people who are suffering from the economic slowdown are the ones who are primarily rooting for Mr Modi; he provides them an outlet to say that life would have been much better had Muslims not been around!"

On the large crowds for Ms Sonia getting translating into votes, the Professor says, "Yes, I do think so. There is a substantial support for the Congress. One thing on which everybody agrees now is that even if the BJP finally wins, it will be by a small margin of a few seats and there is no question of a landslide victory. The last few days will be very crucial. But you are right when you observe that Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani have totally failed to click.

Anyway, at the moment, it seems to be 50:50 and this election promises to be a close one."

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