Anandiben Patel's resignation won't save BJP in Gujarat

A colleague called with the news that Anandiben Patel, in a Facebook post, had offered to quit as Gujarat chief minister.

Seeing my expression change, one person in the group I was with, sensed a major development and asked what had happened. When I announced that she had sent in her papers, someone quipped: "Why?"

I replied, "The actual question instead should be - why so late?"

Also read: Gujarat CM offers to quit on Facebook. Twitter accepts it eagerly

That forms the template of this piece – did the BJP bite the bullet too late? Has the saffron party reached the point of no return in Gujarat? What can the BJP do now? Should the party look for a person with the correct caste credentials (read Patels) or should it go with a person with the administrative ability to revive its sagging fortunes?

But beyond these ponderable points of the immediate and long term future, a few basic questions for a post mortem before rigor mortis sets in.

Was Anandiben Patel responsible for the sorry state of affairs of the BJP in a state where it had not lost an election for more than two decades?

If yes, then why did the party take so long to decide that she must be shunted out well in time for the next Assembly polls due by November 2017?

If Patel is not the guilty party, then it incontrovertibly establishes that her selection was on the basis of the management concept of Peter’s Principle - wherein a person is engaged not on the basis of capability for the future job but on the basis of performance in present job.

Anandiben excelled as a Modi loyalist but was ill-equipped to be chief minister. Who, then, made a wrong choice for the party and why?

Also read: Modi and BJP may lose Gujarat to Congress in 2017

The sorry state that the BJP finds itself in today is mainly due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his refusal to allow a strong second line of leadership to emerge in Gujarat in the years that he was in power.

Stemming primarily from the insecurity of a leader fearing being ousted by an able second-in-command, Modi promoted personal loyalist Patel and gave her precedence over other state BJP leaders who had greater support among people.

From day one in office, Patel’s political authority was not legitimate. She had little mass support, was bereft of great administrative skill, and was at loggerheads with significant sections of the bureaucracy. None of this was her fault because her limitations were known to all, most of all to Modi.

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He should never have handed the Gandhinagar seat to her when he moved to Delhi. He did not anticipate the power vacuum that Gujarat would face after his departure and the need to appoint someone with the capacity to neutralise this.

Within months of assuming office in 2014, it was clear that Anandiben would not be able to successfully lead the BJP in Gujarat to another victory in 2017. She was fast ageing and did not have the dynamism that sans-Modi BJP required in the state.

This assessment became firmer with every new crisis that came the BJP’s way – be it the Patel agitation, corruption charges against Anandiben’s daughter Anar Patel, or the latest, the attack on Dalits in Una, Gir-Somnath, and the statewide Dalit stir.

The question was when would the party decided to replace her and with who. But the Modi-Shah duo failed to make up their mind because they worried that any appointment would reopen factional fights within the state unit. With Anandiben Patel at the helm, at least this was one headache less for the power duo.

But the public announcement on Facebook of her intention to quit suggests that Anandiben did not wish to go quietly. She did not cite growing criticism of her ability to govern as the reason for her abdication, but claimed that as she turns 75 later this year, she wished to give the party the time to groom someone for the post.

It is fair to argue that the BJP's response to any of the two major agitations would have been almost the same even if someone else had been chief minister.

The party, either at the state or at the Centre, was unable to frame a coherent response to the Patidar agitation, and Mohan Bhagwat’s statement in its wake bared the forked tongue of the Sangh Parivar on caste-based reservations.

Similarly, the BJP, even under Modi, made little effort to reach out to Dalits, content as it was with vote banks from other communities. It has indeed been an irony that atrocities against Dalits have been so pronounced in Mahatma Gandhi’s state.

The BJP will be sadly mistaken in believing that that it will win over Dalits to its side with Patel’s resignation.

BJP’s day of reckoning in Gujarat has come a year and half earlier than it should have. Modi, with support from Shah, has no one to blame but himself for the ills of his party.

If ever there was a self-goal in politics, this was it.