Kejriwal's Gujarat Jodo Abhiyan leaves AAP buoyant, Congress jittery, BJP thrilled

On his three-day visit to Gujarat, which concluded earlier this week, Arvind Kejriwal launched his party’s Gujarat Jodo Abhiyan to rebuild the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the state ahead of the 2027 Assembly polls. The sting of AAP’s Delhi defeat salved by the party’s impressive bypoll victories in Punjab’s Ludhiana West and Gujarat’s Visavadar last month, Kejriwal was back to his belligerent ways.

Also read | Can AAP emerge as the third force after BJP and Congress? I Discussion

The former Delhi CM, who had allied with the Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, reiterated that his party’s dalliance with the INDIA bloc was history and asserted that the AAP would end the BJP’s uninterrupted three-decade rule in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state in the next Assembly polls. Though Kejriwal was equally critical of both the BJP and the Congress, it is for the latter that the AAP’s aggressive outreach in Gujarat does not augur well.

Alternative to BJP

The AAP’s Gujarat Jodo Abhiyan may not match in scale, scope or conception Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Abhiyan (of which the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra were a part), but its end goal is the same – electoral revitalisation. Since its inception in 2012, AAP’s electoral growth has been at the Congress’s expense; be it in Delhi, Punjab or Gujarat. Kejriwal has made no secret of the fact that he aspires to make his party the obvious alternative to the BJP, a pedestal that the Congress currently occupies nationally and in over a dozen Indian states despite its repeated electoral failures of the past decade.

Expanding the AAP’s footprint in Gujarat is a natural choice for Kejriwal. The AAP had already made impressive electoral gains in the state in 2022 when it polled a 12.92 per cent vote share in the Assembly elections and won five seats. That the same election saw the Congress’s vote share fall by almost 14 per cent from the previous polls was a clear indicator that the AAP had eaten into the Congress’s traditional vote.

Until 2022, the Congress maintained a nearly 40 per cent vote share in the state despite not being able to oust the BJP from power. In the 2022 polls, with the AAP registering a near 13 per cent vote share, the Congress’s vote share came tumbling down to 27.29 per cent and its seats plummeted to an all-time low of just 17 in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly. In as many as 35 assembly seats, the AAP finished as the first runner-up behind the BJP, while the Congress was pushed to the third spot in each of them.

AAP’s expanding footprint

Furthermore, the AAP’s gains were not limited to one region of Gujarat but were spread across the state. The AAP polled a sizeable votes in Assembly segments that fall in the districts of Ahmedabad, Aravali, Surendranagar, Rajkot, Surat, Jamnagar, Dwarka, Gir-Somnath, Amreli, Botad, Panchmahal, Valsad, Chhota Udaipur and Dahod.

This footprint, even though it did not translate into victories for the AAP and ended up helping the BJP secure its best performance of 156 seats and a 52.50 per cent vote share, signalled that Gujaratis unhappy with the BJP were ready to look beyond the Congress for an electoral alternative.

Also read | Visavadar bypoll result: AAP’s Gopal Italia wins in Gujarat

All of this, along with the Congress’s characteristic inertia, factional feuds, organisational rot and the susceptibility of its leaders to be poached by the BJP, would have given Kejriwal the confidence he needed to launch his Gujarat Jodo Abhiyan.

With a head-start of a good two and a half years before the 2027 polls, Kejriwal, with his aggressive outreach strategies and almost anarchist ways of countering political rivals, hopes to present the AAP as a more credible outfit than a listless Congress to fight the BJP in Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s home turf.

Tricky terrain for Congress

This isn’t good news for the Congress, which, except for the 2012 Assembly polls, has failed to pose any real electoral challenge to the BJP in Gujarat since 1995. After managing to score a lone Lok Sabha seat from Gujarat last year following a decade of drawing a blank in the state, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had claimed in Parliament – and outside it – that his party “will defeat the BJP in Gujarat in the next Assembly election”.

In April this year, the party held its AICC session in Ahmedabad – a first in the state since 1961 – and declared that its sangathan srijan (organisation building) campaign would start from Gujarat. Rahul chose Gujarat as the launch pad for his new system of picking district Congress chiefs through feedback collected by AICC observers from the grassroots. The list of new DCC chiefs was declared on June 21, but instead of infusing new life into the party, as Rahul had hoped for, the announcement only triggered more unrest.

The new appointments were a commendable exercise in balancing tricky caste equations as fair representation was given to backward castes, Dalits, tribals and forward castes. Yet, gender disparity in the list of new DCC chiefs was so glaring that Sonam Patel, the newly appointed Ahmedabad Congress chief and only woman to feature among the 40 new appointees, publicly slammed the lack of representation for women. The Congress also drew flak from within its ranks for not naming a single Muslim DCC president. The furore forced the central leadership to hurriedly carve a new DCC unit – that for Bharuch City – out of the wider Bharuch district for which Rajendrasinh Rana had already been named chief, and anoint Salim Amdavadi at its helm.

Jolt to Congress in bypolls

Two days later, as results for the Visavadar and Kadi Assembly bypolls were declared, the Congress got another jolt. In Visavadar, a seat the mighty BJP had lost to the Congress in a bypoll in 2014 and then again in the 2017 state polls before losing it in 2022 to the AAP, the AAP’s Gopal Italia emerged victorious.

Also read | Gujarat Congress chief Gohil resigns after party’s bypoll defeats

While Italia’s victory was a setback for the BJP, considering that it had failed to win the seat since 2007 but captured it briefly by poaching the Congress and AAP’s victorious MLAs in 2022 and 2024, respectively, the bigger humiliation was reserved for the Congress, whose candidate didn’t just finish third in the bypoll but polled a measly 3.70 per cent of the total vote and forfeited his security deposit.

The Congress could have taken some heart from the result in the Kadi bypoll, in which the AAP candidate finished third with a pathetic 1.84 per cent vote share, but then the BJP’s scale of victory here denied the Congress even that comfort. This was a seat the Congress had last won in 2012 with an over 47 per cent vote share, and though it lost Kadi to the BJP in the 2017 and 2022 polls, its vote share remained an impressive 46 per cent and 39.37 per cent, respectively, in these elections. In contrast, last month’s bypoll saw the Congress’s vote share in Kadi slide down further to just over 35 per cent while the BJP, which won by a margin of nearly 40,000 votes, polled 59.39 per cent of the total votes.

Gujarat Congress in tizzy

The setback for AAP in Kadi notwithstanding, the bypoll results afford Kejriwal a chance to aggressively assert that the Congress is not capable of defeating the BJP in bipolar or even triangular contests, while his party can, as seen in Visavadar.

Congress sources concede that the party is in a tizzy in the state despite Rahul’s tall claims about organisational and electoral revival. Senior Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil tendered his resignation from the post of state party chief within hours of the bypoll losses owning moral responsibility but sources close to him told The Federal that his decision had “less to do with the defeat and more to do with his loyalists being ignored two days earlier in the list of new DCC presidents” because a bulk of the fresh district appointees belonged to the intra-party camp led by former state Congress chief Amit Chavda.

Now, while Kejriwal and his acolytes in Gujarat are going all guns blazing in their attempt to cash in on the Visavadar victory and rebuild the AAP, the Congress is back to searching for a new state chief, ironing out dissent caused over the DCC chief appointments and cajoling miffed or politically insecure leaders who are contemplating a future in the AAP, if not in the BJP.

Also read | Bypolls results: Why it's no good news for Congress and INDIA Bloc

As the Congress struggles to set its house in order and fend off the emerging challenge from a buoyant AAP, the ruling BJP is sitting pretty, confident in the calculation that a split of anti-BJP votes between its two political rivals, come 2027 polls will keep its saffron citadel of three decades safe against any breach. “The AAP and Congress are fighting for the space of the principal Opposition party in the state and not for coming to power. Let them fight. Gujarat trusts only Modi and the BJP, and we will win again in 2027,” a Union minister from the state known for his proximity to the Prime Minister told The Federal.