The amazing electoral battle in Gujarat

https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170811/jsp/frontpage/story_166706.jsp

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This is not just my victory. It is a defeat of the most blatant use of money power,muscle power and abuse of state machinery

https://twitter.com/ahmedpatel

The dramatic midnight twists and turns in what should have been an anodyne and colourless Rajya Sabha election from Gujarat tells you one thing about the BJP under Amit Shah: It is in constant poll mode. No election is too small; no seat too inconsequential for the take-no-prisoners approach of the party president and his expansionist ambitions.

But this time, did Shah’s over-enthusiasm end up doing the beleaguered Congress a favour? Did the eventual fight to the finish challenge the BJP’s notion of invincibility? Ahmed Patel, the elusive, influential political secretary to Sonia Gandhi has lived to fight another day and a party — otherwise paralysed by a weird mix of denial and despair, has been forcibly shaken from its stupor.

But hold both the applause and the commiserations just yet. Admittedly the party showed a rare, never-say-die energy in swiftly mobilising the Election Commission when two of its cross voters revealed their ballot was for the BJP; but at the end of the day it is Ahmed Patel who won and not the Congress. Leveraging what one Congressman described as “old equities” Ahmed Patel’s fight to retain his seat was almost entirely an individual battle till the penultimate moments when the party machinery got involved. Till then most Congressmen were busy trying to find some disassociation between Patel and his boss Sonia Gandhi. Had he lost, the defeat would have been pinned at his door; now that he has won, the party wants to share the credit.

If anything, Patel’s victory — met with distinctly noticeable silence on social media by Rahul Gandhi who found time to publicly tweet Venkaiah Naidu but not his own party’s veteran — has exposed the internal fault-lines and the generational collisions within the party. One Congressman said Patel’s victory had pushed Rahul Gandhi “deeper into a shell.” The tenuous relationship between Gandhi and Patel is well known to those who track the Congress. For the past three years amid clichéd forecasts of Rahul Gandhi taking over from his mother, Patel would frequently tell those who met him that most decisions had been taken without him in the loop. Even accounting for characteristic self-deprecation, Patel did not hide the fact that he was not central to the decision-making of Rahul and his sister Priyanka. Equally, Rahul is known to have told people close to him that the Congress needs an “open-heart surgery”; he privately believes that something original can rise only from the ashes of the old-guard politics that leaders like Patel represented. The Gujarat victory proves any such obituary to be vastly premature. In any case the older Congressmen have shown way more spunk than the less-driven, more urbane and distinctly less political younger Turks, whether in Gujarat, or earlier in the year, in Punjab.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/it-was-ahmed-patel-who-won-in-gujarat-not-the-congress-party/story-Pemc6wfVzHhwQlTtlhARaL.html

And, after the Gujarat drama, Sharad Pawar's NCP looks all set to become a BJP ally like Nitish's JD(U).

http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/after-gujarat-drama-sharad-pawars-party-skips-opposition-meet-1736576