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The forthcoming Gujarat Assembly elections between two main contenders — the Congress and BJP — are likely to see a depletion of their vote shares at the hands of other parties, also having secular and Hindutva leanings.
More than 10 national and regional parties have shown a willingness to contest in the Gujarat elections, which has rung alarm bells for poll managers of the Congress and BJP as they are likely to become show spoilers in the elections, party sources said.
Those who have decided to jump into the election fray are the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the JD(U), NCP, Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party and Left parties such as the CPI (M), which may harm the Congress’s secular vote. Some of these parties had contested elections last time also.
For the first time in the State, the BJP is facing a situation where the parties sharing the same ideology, including the Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP) floated by rebel leader Keshubhai Patel and the Shiv Sena, will also contest the polls.
The other major factor is the elections in Gujarat are being held for the first time after delimitation, where boundaries of more than 60 constituencies out of a total of 182 have been re-drawn, sources said.
The delimitation exercise was carried out on the basis of the latest census with an overall view that the population per Assembly seat is in the same range and to identify the reserved seats of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The recommendations of the 2002 delimitation commission were approved by the President in 2008.
Both the main political parties are unsure of the outcome of elections in the seats where boundaries have been re-drawn due to demographic and voter profile changes, with respect to caste, following and religion.
In the 2007 elections, more than 20 seats were won or lost by a margin of less than 5,000 votes.
“If parties such as the SP, LJP, JD (U) term themselves as secular, to prove that they are truly so they should refrain from doing things which harm secular forces,” Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi said.
He, however, added that the voters of Gujarat have always been comfortable with the two-party system.
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