Priyanka Gandhi’s rally reminds Gujarat of Indira Gandhi’s rally in 1978

It was, by all accounts, an audacious move for the Congress to launch its poll campaign for the 2019 election from Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home turf. It was a ‘masterstroke’, exclaimed a retired bureaucrat, for the Congress to beard the lion in its own den.

It undoubtedly ruffled the BJP. The Prime Minister, as is his ‘fitrat’ (nature), wrote a stinging blog post the day the CWC met, attacking the Congress. The BJP engineered defections from the Congress and promptly made the MLAs from the Congress join the ministry. Indeed, 33% of the ministers in Vijay Rupani’s ministry in Gujarat happen to be former Congress MLAs.

Also irked by Hardik Patel joining the Congress, Gujarat BJP is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that he is not able to contest the election, reviving a criminal case against him and keeping his petitions in suspended animation.

And yet, the huge crowd that turned up to listen to Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress general secretary, who addressed her maiden rally outside the Nehru-Gandhi family’s pocket borough in Uttar Pradesh, took both organisers and the ruling BJP in the state by surprise.

Gujarat Congress hopes Priyanka Gandhi will turn the tide in its favour just as her grandmother Mrs Indira Gandhi had done for the party in 1978. At the end of the day, the elderly reminisced about Mrs Gandhi’s first poll meeting in Gujarat during the 19-month Janata Party rule in Delhi.

Thousands of people, mostly adivasis had flocked then to Mrs Gandhi’s rally held in Dharampur in South Gujarat and she had returned to power in the subsequent general elections.

The aggressive pro-poor policy announcements by the Congress to garner support of OBCs, SC, ST and Muslims had helped the Congress win both the Lok Sabha and the state assembly elections held in Gujarat thereafter. “Indira Gandhi, zindabad!” was the slogan that rent through over 200,000-strong audience while Priyanka delivered her short spontaneous speech, the delivery style of which reminded senior citizens among them of her grandmother.

“Priyanka’s sober speech, critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unfulfilled promises, went down well with the educated middle-class people among the audience present in the rally as also those who watched her on the TV in their drawing rooms,” observed Dr Ghanshyam Shah, eminent academic and political commentator.

This is considered a breakthrough for the Congress in view of the sharp communal divide seen among the urban educated people of Gujarat after the 2002 post Godhra violence.

For the state Congress leaders, the overwhelming turnout of people at ‘Sankalp Rally’ addressed by Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi, was unexpected. The party, claimed insiders, had arranged for transport to ferry about 50,000 people from the hinterland. But Four times as many turned up. Not surprisingly, therefore, there were fewer Congress flags seen in the rally. “People turned up on their own. Hardik Patel, the iconic youth leader of the pro-reservation Patidar agitation, who joined the Congress, and the OBC leader Alpesh Thakore, who had joined the party and won the last Gujarat elections, defeating a BJP heavy weight, are said to have been mainly responsible for mobilising people for the rally.

Hardik wanted to contest the coming Lok Sabha election from Jamnagar but may not be able to contest as his petition challenging conviction in a criminal case by the Visnagar district court is pending disposal by the Gujarat High Court. “Hardik not able to contest the election won’t dissuade him from campaigning for the Congress. In fact, he would work with extra zeal. He is considered a ‘martyr’ of sorts by the Patel youth as he spent over a jail in a sedition case slapped on him by the BJP government,” points out former state Education Minister Hasmukh Patel.

“The joining of Hardik in Congress and the huge success of Priyanka and Rahul’s rally has achieved one thing for certain. It will stop defection from Congress to BJP,” he says. BJP engineered defections of Congress MLAs last week and made three of them ministers.

The BJP’s design to persuade Alpesh Thakore to also defect, however, received a setback with the latter declaring his resolve to remain with the Congress