Gujarat Watch: Is AAP, And Not BJP, Setting The Agenda for Gujarat Polls 2022? Here’s Why It Seems So

Gujarat Election 2022: This is the first time that education is on electoral discourse in Gujarat polls and exposes ruling BJP’s underbelly.

PM Modi in Gandhinagar to launch the Mission School of Excellence in Adalaj.

Source : ANI

Ahmedabad: At the pinnacle of power after winning the 2002 elections in Gujarat, then chief minister Narendra Modi would often taunt the opposition parties and the media alike that they would follow him wherever he went. That he would set the agenda. This continued for a good 20 years, into 2022 Gujarat elections, until a veritable bolt struck from the blue — the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by a former IIT grad, Arvind Kejriwal.

The answer to whether the AAP delivers an unprecedented shocker by having and simultaneously eating the 2022 Gujarat poll cake, if it comes a cropper or emerges as the largest opposition party lies less than two months away. While only AAP has already decided candidates for as many as 72 of the 182 candidates, the BJP and the Congress are yet to finalise their contestants. A clearer picture about who carries the day might emerge after all candidates are finalised by all three key parties.  

But more significant than the outcome is that it is Kejriwal who seems to have set the agenda for this election battle, and not the mighty Modi, though Gujarat is the latter's own backyard.

A fledgling party that contested 30 seats in the Gujarat assembly polls in 2017 and its candidates couldn’t even salvage their deposits has managed to pitchfork education onto the vortex of a poll campaign. A subject that hitherto appeared too academic to jazz up an election pitch is on the centrestage now, arguably for the first time with such aggression across the country in several decades.

It is unprecedented, and that too in Gujarat, that the BJP government is announcing schemes to counter the AAP. On October 19, Prime Minister Modi checked out a model classroom and announced a whopping Rs 4,260-crore project, Mission Schools of Excellence, to create smart public-school classrooms in the state.

Kejriwal didn’t let go of this opportunity and stated: “It is 75 years after Independence, but we are happy that government schools and education for the poor is part of the mainstream political discourse. This is our biggest achievement.”  

मुझे बेहद ख़ुशी है कि आज देश की सभी पार्टियों और नेताओं को शिक्षा और स्कूलों की बात करनी पड़ रही है। ये हमारी सबसे बड़ी उपलब्धि है। मैं उम्मीद करता हूँ कि केवल चुनाव के दौरान शिक्षा याद ना आए। सभी सरकारें मिलकर महज़ 5 साल में सभी सरकारी स्कूलों को शानदार बना सकते हैं। pic.twitter.com/FJYSgM3HoW

— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) October 19, 2022

Images from the event in Gandhinagar showed the PM sitting in what looked like a makeshift model classroom. It was pointed out by many that the window in the classroom’s images was not real. There were only six students in the small classroom while a lecture was on as Modi sat next to a student.     

Kejriwal took a jibe at the PM and tweeted that the latter should make optimum use of the AAP’s expertise to upgrade government schools across the country.  

Loosely translated, his tweet in Hindi read: "PM Sir, we have done an excellent job in the education sector in Delhi. We made all the government schools of Delhi model smart classrooms in just five years. Similarly, schools across the country can recover in five years. We have experience. Please use us completely and liberally for this. Let's do it together for the country." 

There was another tweet with an attached old image that showed Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, who is also Delhi's education minister, in a classroom.

Kejriwal added: “I hope that education is not remembered only during elections. All governments joining together can drastically change the face of all government schools in just 5 years."

The AAP chief hopes to replicate in Gujarat the campaigns that took the party to dizzy heights in Delhi and Punjab by using his government’s education and health sector initiatives as the key USP, besides the litany of freebies that he has been announcing during his frequent visits to Gujarat for the past few months.

Even as Kejriwal has been coming almost every week to Gujarat with a slew of poll promises that he calls guarantees and the BJP calls ‘revadis’, PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah are also making frequent trips to their poll-bound home state.

In fact, Modi has come calling three times – each visit of two to three days – this month and is likely to be in Gujarat again on October 31 on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s birth anniversary amid speculations that the Election Commission may announce Gujarat election dates on November 1. Amit Shah is also seen campaigning more frequently and for longer periods.

At a presser earlier in the week, Congress senior observer for Gujarat and Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot smirked at these frequent visits to say: “The PM should open a camp office in Gujarat to ensure his work doesn’t suffer.” He went on to say that being a prime minister, he doesn’t even need to come to his home state so often, indicating that the BJP feared unexpected electoral reversals in Gujarat this election.         

But adept that the BJP is in handling an allegedly disintegrating Congress, it appears more worried about the forays of Kejriwal who has learnt the art and theatre of keeping the BJP on its toes. He pays back the BJP in its own coin, tweet-for-tweet, allegation-for-allegation, theatrics-for-theatrics. He hasn’t taken a leaf from the BJP’s book, he seems to have snatched the entire book.

Gujarat’s Govt School Education: Not Much To Write Home About 

The state’s allocation for the education sector has been continuously on the decline and is far below 6% of the GSDP, which has been considered a benchmark in the New Education Policy announced by the central government. Gujarat’s eminent economist Prof Hemant Shah, who has compiled a research publication on various state policies titled “Sachchai Gujarat ki”, says: “Two state budgets have been presented after the New Education Policy, but the allocation remains less than 2 percent of the GDP as has been the trend in this government.”

He cites the state’s budget documents to point out that the allocation to education was an apologetic 1.93% of the GDP of Rs 16.59 lakh crore in financial year 2020-21. Given that the state’s GDP has been estimated at Rs 20 lakh crore for 2022-23, the spending on education works out to only 1.53%!

According to the Gujarat government’s budgets through the last 13 years, the allocation on education has fallen drastically from 16.5% of the total budget of Rs 69,000 crore to 12.6% in the 2022-23 budget of a whopping Rs 2.41 lakh crore. In other words, Gujarat’s total budget has risen 3.5 times in 13 years but its allocation to education has dropped by 4%.

Last, But Not The Least…

Arvind Kejriwal’s campaign is also hitting hard on the health infrastructure of the state home to the country’s PM, home minister and health minister. The AAP chief has been citing the success of his government’s mohalla clinics in Delhi as part of his campaign arsenal.

Though opinion poll surveys so far are giving the ruling BJP a clear edge, Gujarat Election 2022 promises to be a three-cornered fight since AAP can no longer be dismissed as one that would merely cut into the BJP and Congress votes, with the latter suffering more than the former.

(The writer is a veteran journalist and Founder Editor, Development News Network [DNN], Gujarat)

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