Arvind Kejriwal (AAP), Narendra Modi (BJP) and Rahul Gandhi (Congress)
Campaigning for the first phase of the Gujarat assembly election on December 1 ended on a euphoric note on Tuesday with top leaders of all major political parties making a last-minute pitch to the electorate across 89 of the 182 seats.
Voting for the remaining 93 seats will take place on December 5 and all the results will be declared on December 8.
The Aam Aadmi Party is (AAP) engaged in a fierce triangular struggle with incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress in the election.
The Chief Electoral Office (CEO) in Gujarat said 788 candidates from 39 political parties and 339 independent candidates are in the fray in the first phase of the election.
The campaign for the first phase by the BJP, AAP and Congress revolved around an array of issues.
The BJP, which has been ruling Gujarat since 1995, is seeking its seventh straight term in the state that is home to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
To attract voters, the party put all its political heavyweights at the vanguard of its campaign. In the last leg of campaign for phase one of the election, Prime Minister Modi addressed more than a dozen rallies besides leading a massive road show in Surat.
The poll exercise was spearheaded by Shah, who has been campaigning in the state for more than two months. Also, the party brought 40 of its national level leaders to Gujarat woo voters.
The saffron party’s campaign featured a promise to implement a Uniform Civil Code, setting up of an anti-radicalisation cell, hosting of the Olympic Games in the state in 2036 and creating two million jobs.
The party is eyeing 150 seats in the state and is confident of breaking all previous records.
The Congress waged a very low-profile campaign in the beginning. The party’s central leadership was with the Congress presidential election and the Bharat Jodo Yatra spearheaded by Rahul Gandhi.
The party’s campaign gained momentum only after Mallikarjun Kharge was elected to the Congress party’s top post. On his direction, the central leadership hit the campaign trail, strongly focused on rural Gujarat to garner support.
Rahul Gandhi, who refrained from campaigning in Himachal Pradesh, addressed two rallies in Gujarat, one each in Rajkot and Surat.
The party’s campaign was also hit by the absence of Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, who is also the party’s in-charge for Gujarat.
He was proposed as a candidate for the post of Congress chief, but refused o contest the election after his followers submitted resignations in Rajasthan.
As per the party’s rules, he was supposed to leave his chief ministerial post after getting elected as Congress president. His loyalists wanted him to continue as Rajasthan chief minister.
The party position performed strongly in the 2017 Assembly elections when it won 77 seats and restricted the BJP to 99. This time, party has set a target of 125 seats to rule the state.
Congress has banked on the promise of many freebies, including 300 units of free electricity every month, an unemployment allowance of Rs 3,000 per month, and a Rs 2,000 pension to the differently abled, widows, senior citizens and single women.
Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP has turned the contest in Gujarat into a three-cornered one. The party has announced candidates across all 182 seats and named its chief ministerial candidate as well.
The party is hopeful of getting enough votes to be recognised as a state party in a fourth state, Gujarat, which will automatically qualify it to become a national party.
The party got busy with campaigning in the state even before the poll schedule was announced by the Election Commission of India.
As the party started receiving responses from people, it shifted its focus to Gujarat from Himachal Pradesh, where Assembly polls ended on November 12.
Kejriwal, his deputy Manish Sisodia, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and Rajya Sabha MP Raghav were AAP’s main faces in the campaign.
The party made the same promises as it made in Delhi and was elected to run the city-state. AAP’s major poll plank has been the provision of quality education and health care.
In all his rallies and road shows, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal promised free education to all students enrolled in government schools in Gujarat. He has also promised that everyone in Gujarat will have access to free and quality healthcare.
