Battle with no losers!

Final verdicts of the high-stake Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections are out. New records have been created. Gujarat has been won by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the seventh time in a row, while its idea of 'Mission Repeat' has been outrightly rejected by the voters of Himachal Pradesh. Also, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) passes its eligibility test to become a national party in a short span of 10 years of its inception by securing a significant 12.9 per cent vote share (41.12 lakh votes) and winning five seats in Gujarat.

Poll results of Gujarat establish the fact that there is no dent in the charisma of Narendra Modi. He is still an exception. After winning three assembly elections on the trot, and ruling Gujarat for more than 12 years prior to moving to Delhi in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only face of the BJP to lead from the front in the campaign trail of Gujarat state assembly or, for that matter, any other assembly.

The other key factors that led to BJP's massive victory in Gujarat include replacing sitting MLAs with new faces, pushing the development agenda, bringing Hardik Patel — the face of the Patidar movement — to its side, focusing on OBC-dominated seats by bringing in Alpesh Thakor into the BJP, etc.

Paying his 'obeisance' to the people of the state for a landslide victory, PM Modi said, "Thank you Gujarat. I am overcome with a lot of emotions seeing the phenomenal election results. People blessed politics of development and at the same time expressed a desire that they want this momentum to continue at a greater pace. I bow to Gujarat's Jan Shakti."

The PM also expressed his views after the BJP won the tribal-dominated Jhagadia assembly seat in Gujarat for the first time, by saying that the party candidate Ritesh Vasava defeated veteran tribal leader and seven-time MLA Chhotubhai Vasava by 23,500 votes.

However, the PM also hailed the Election Commission for conducting elections peacefully. "As far as I know, re-polling in any poll booth was not required. I also want to thank the voters of Himachal. The difference between the number of votes for the BJP and the Congress was less than one per cent", Modi said.

It's the reflection of PM Modi's high-decibel poll campaigning that despite a huge anti-incumbency, the BJP fetched 43 per cent vote share in Himachal Pradesh and won 25 seats.

For the BJP, winning Gujarat is a cornerstone victory as the ruling party has created a 'record result' in the state. In Gujarat, which has been a laboratory for Hindutva politics for a long time, the BJP has registered a landslide victory in the state assembly polls for the seventh time in a row since 1995. With this 'record result', it has become the only party, after the Left Front in West Bengal, to win seven consecutive elections in a state.

Notably, the CPM had won seven straight elections in West Bengal from 1977, before being defeated by Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress in 2011. The CPM ruled Bengal for 34 years; the BJP has now given itself a chance to be in power continuously from 1998 to 2027, excluding the Vaghela-Parikh interlude.

The BJP bagged 156 seats out of 182 seats in Gujarat legislative assembly. The previous record was for 149 seats in 1985 when the Indian National Congress, under Madhav Singh Solanki, had won the assembly elections. The history was created by the Congress in 1985 when the party had fought the election on the implementation of "KHAM" (Koli-Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, and Muslim) theory under which the reservation quota for OBCs was increased.

BJP's tide was so strong in the state that it even remained unaffected from the grave Morbi tragedy. BJP's five-time MLA Kantilal Amrutiya's secured 1.14 lakh votes, beating his closest rival, Jayantilal Patel of Congress, with a margin of over 60,000 votes.

The Gujarat verdict of 2022 will have a strong impact on the INC. The party has not been decimated vertically as it lost 60 seats in comparison to the 2017 assembly elections; it has won just 17 seats with 27 per cent of the votes, while in 2017, it had won 77 seats and received 41 per cent of votes.

Interestingly, the tradition of voting out the ruling party in every election continued in Himachal Pradesh this time too, and voters of the hill state trusted the commitments made by Congress' general secretary and the face of the Gandhi family, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who led from the front in disseminating the poll planks of the Grand Old Party among the people of the state.

So, the outcome of the final results of the assembly elections is that Gujarat created history and Himachal Pradesh maintained its history which is ongoing since 1985.

Gujarat, which has a history of Jan Sangh's politics, was the first state where the BJP had received a double-digit vote share in the 1980s after its emergence and, since 1995, the BJP has been receiving more than 43 per cent of the vote share.

In 2022, the BJP's vote share rose to 52.5 per cent (1.67 crore votes), which is 3.4 per cent up from the previous assembly elections held in 2017. The vote share of Congress reduced from 41.4 per cent in 2017 to just 27.3 per cent (86.83 lakh votes), fetching just 17 seats in Gujarat.

As per political analysts, even though the party did not field a single Muslim candidate in any of the 182 seats in the Gujarat assembly, the constituencies dominated by Muslims have played a key role in the BJP's record victory in Gujarat in many such seats that the ruling party has won at the cost of the Congress.

The BJP has won 17 of the 19 assembly seats in Gujarat where Muslims are present in a significant number. Meanwhile, the Congress has won the remaining 2 of the 19 seats — Jamalpur-Khadia and Vadgam.

After making a seat-wise analysis, it has come to the notice that the division of votes among mostly independent Muslim candidates paved the way for the ruling party's nominee to win the seat. For instance, in the seat of Limbayat, out of a total of 44 candidates, 36 are Muslims. The seat has been won by the BJP's Sangitaben Rajendra Patil as she emerged victorious by securing over 52 per cent of the vote share.

The runner-up in this seat is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) with just a 20 per cent vote share.

This time, only one Muslim candidate — Imran Khedawala of the Congress — has made it to the Gujarat assembly. Apart from Khedawala, two other Muslim candidates — MA Pirzada in Wankaner and Gyasuddin Shaikh in Dariapur — failed to win the seats that they had won in 2017.

Notably, Muslims make up nine per cent of Gujarat's population but have had a history of poor representation in the state. It's interesting to note that the Godhra assembly seat, which is a densely Muslim-populated seat, has been won by a BJP candidate, Chandrasinh Raulji, for the seventh time in a row. It's the same Raulji who had dubbed the rapists of Bilkis Bano as "Sanskari Brahmins". After 1998, the BJP has not fielded a Muslim candidate in the Gujarat assembly elections.

The candidates of the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) contested 13 of the 19 seats with a significant Muslim population but failed to make a difference in any of those. The only seat where the AIMIM won a significant chunk was Bhuj (17.36 per cent votes), but it's still less than the BJP's winning margin there.

Commenting on the BJP's massive win in Gujarat, political analyst Pavan Varma said, "I have two takeaways. So long as the opposition is divided, the BJP is the obvious, transparent winner. The opposition doesn't seem to understand this. The second takeaway is you got to have a narrative and a leader who can match what Narendra Modi is to the BJP."

As Congress has got absolute majority in Himachal Pradesh, the credit for snatching the victory from the 'impactful' ruling party goes to none other than the party's general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who played a key role in balancing the power and differences between local satraps of the party.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who was tasked to lead the show in Himachal Pradesh after facing a worst-ever defeat in Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, worked in unity with local leaders and banked upon their choices of candidate section.

Winning 40 out of 68 seats is one of the best performances of the party in Himachal Pradesh. The party was restricted to 21 seats in the 2017 elections. Though Congress managed to get just one per cent more votes in 2022, it has put about 60 per cent more seats in its bag.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra started her campaign trail in Himachal Pradesh on October 12 and held several roadshows and rallies in Solan, Mandi, Sirmaur, Kangra and Una. The party's main focus was on the Kangra region which turned out to be a result-driven move, as Congress has won 10 out of 15 seats.

Priyanka Gandhi, along with Chhattisgarh CM and party's state in-charge Bhupesh Baghel and former Rajasthan deputy CM Sachin Pilot, campaigned hard across the state over the last four weeks. This augured well for the party's candidates.

The pertinent issues that Congress raised while seeking the votes include bringing back the Old Pension Scheme, drawbacks of the 'Agniveer scheme' and its withdrawal after being in power at the Centre, employment for local youth, rise in the prices of essential commodities and gas, etc.

The roles of Himachal Congress president Pratibha Singh (who is the wife of late former CM Virbhadra Singh), Rajeev Shukla, Pratap Singh Bajwa, etc. are very significant in scripting the victory for the party.

According to political analysts, the women's anger over price rise has made a huge difference in deciding the fate of the BJP candidates as the state witnessed heavy voting by female voters, whose turnout was 76.8 per cent, which was over four per cent points more than the turnout of males (72.45 per cent).

Given that there was a lot of resentment among the voters against the ruling BJP government over the issues of rising prices of essential commodities like fuel and gas, most of the women voters trusted the commitments made by Congress leaders to provide relief from it.

If the verdict of the Gujarat election has created history for the BJP, it has also given an opportunity to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to make its presence felt at the national level, as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal-led party, which was founded in 2012, has now joined the elite club of national parties.

As of now, there are only eight national parties recognised by the Election Commission of India. They are: BJP, Congress, National People's Party, TMC, NCP, CPI, CPM, and BSP. The AAP has qualified to become the ninth national party.

A national party needs to have two per cent of Lok Sabha seats in a minimum of three states, which means 11 seats, but AAP has no Lok Sabha MPs, as all its MPs are in Rajya Sabha. AAP would get the national party tag on the basis of its vote share in four states.

Since the AAP already has a significant number of vote shares in Delhi and Punjab, the party has secured above six per cent vote share in Goa and 13 per cent in Gujarat which makes it eligible for the national party tag.

Thanking the people for helping the AAP in "breaching the BJP's fortress" in Gujarat, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal said, "I am thankful to the people of Gujarat for helping us attain the status of a national party. Very few parties enjoy the status and now we are one of them. Ours is only a 10-year-old party."

"Your AAP is a national party now. Gujarat's people have made it a national party. On the basis of votes polled in Gujarat, legally, AAP is now a national party," Kejriwal added.

Though it would just be the beginning for the AAP in the role of a national party, the political commentators have raised apprehensions about maintaining the national status of the party for a longer time. In the past, some of the regional parties across the counry, that had become national parties are now restricted to their states of origin only.

Views expressed are personal