Will Vaghela’s Jan Vikalp Party only serve to help BJP?

After senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel retained his Rajya Sabha seat in August, Shankersinh ‘Bapu’ Vaghela — he had then only quit the party and staked his all in trying to scuttle the election of Sonia Gandhi’s confidante — was staring at political irrelevance.

Today, as leader of his nascent Jan Vikalp party, Vaghela seems set to rescue the ruling BJP, whose member he was, 21 years ago. The Jan Vikalp Party will contest all 182 seats to the Gujarat Assembly, he announced earlier this week, effectively emerging as the BJP’s ‘B Team’, eating into some of the anti-incumbency votes that would have otherwise helped the Congress.

In North India, such outfits, known as vote katwa (vote-cleaving), regularly emerge in elections, who contest not to win themselves but to split votes and make their ‘sleeping partners’, the candidates of major financing parties, win!

Vaghela’s party will contest as the All India Hindustan Congress and its symbol — that of a farmer driving a tractor — as it was too late in the day for the Jan Vikalp Party to get itself registered.

In his party manifesto, Vaghela has promised to provide a 25 per cent additional quota in government jobs to the upper castes and Patidars, and 10 per cent out of the 27 per cent available to the OBCs, to the State’s backward Koli and Thakore communities. Significantly, Thakore Sena leader Alpesh Thakore, who was also the Convener of OBC-SC-ST Ekta Manch, joined the Congress this week in the presence of party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi.

Interestingly, Vaghela tried to trigger controversy with his remark that filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali must hold a special screening of his latest, Padmavati , for the Rajputs, thus trying to strike a chord with his own people in Gujarat and Rajasthan, where the AIHC is based. A section of the Rajputs is already up in arms against Gujarat BJP chief Jitu Vaghani on issues pertaining to the Saurashtra region.

Vaghela had, in the 1990s, played a crucial role in making the BJP win and sink in Gujarat, and formed his own government with Congress support. The maverick leader’s Rashtriya Janata Party (RJP), could, however, win only four Assembly seats in the 1998 polls, forcing him to merge it with the Congress.

When in the BJP, Bapu was suspected to be a Congress agent; in the Congress, he was seen as a dyed-in-the-wool saffronite — this was probably one reason why he was not declared the chief ministerial candidate recently.

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