We’ll win as Gujaratis feel connected to PM Modi: New Gujarat BJP chief

During the 2019 elections, the whole world was looking at the Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was contesting from there. The world media had gathered there and were constantly looking for a story. I too, being an editor of a reputed newspaper at that time, had gone to cover the seat. I reached the BJP’s office in Varanasi and saw Gujarat’s Navsari MP Chandrakant Raghunath Patil along with some local leaders managing the elections. PM Modi was contesting from Varanasi but he was campaigning for the party across the country. Being preoccupied elsewhere, Modi had given the charge of Varanasi to his most trusted man from Gujarat — Patil — who has now been made Gujarat BJP’s president ahead of the state elections.

While talking exclusively to The Daily Guardian, the newlyappointed Gujarat BJP chief opened up on the initial days of his career. Patil said, “I got a job in the police department in Gujarat in 1975. In 1984, a union was formed over the problems faced by the police personnel in the controversy in which I was suspended, and then I quit my job and took up politics. I joined the BJP in May 1989 and worked with Kashiram Rana.”

After several rounds of discussions and amidst many rumours, PM Modi selected the most outspoken Patil as the state BJP’s first non-Gujarati president. However, Patil didn’t agree to this and said he never considered himself an outsider. “Look, I am not a non-Gujarati, this controversy is wrong because I was born on 16 March 1955 in Pipri-Akraut, a small village in Edlabad in the then Jalgaon district of Bombay State, meaning Maharashtra and Gujarat were one and the same. When Maharashtra and Gujarat were formed, then my family came to Gujarat, I studied in the school of south Gujarat and I studied in the Industrial Training Institute of Surat,” he explained.

Though Patil now has strong roots in the inner circles of his party, it is said about him that in the 1990s, when there was a rift between Keshubhai Patel and Narendra Modi in Gujarat BJP, then he chose to side with Modi. Patil never looked back in politics after this. When Gujarat Lok Sabha constituencies were reconstituted in 2009, then Navsari Lok Sabha constituency in south Gujarat came into existence and the BJP put its trust on Patil for this seat. Although the BJP lost the 2009 general elections, Patil won his seat by a landslide margin, and took the first big step into politics.

Now that he has become the state president, he won’t be confined to south Gujarat. The toughest challenge would be to take the Saurashtra lobby together which has a stronghold of the BJP.

Patil’s immediate challenge would be to deliver victory for the BJP in eight Assembly by-elections, supposed to be held in October-November, and then in the corporation and district panchayat polls. “The BJP will win the elections because the Opposition has neither an issue nor a leader. Society and the whole country are connected to Prime Minister Modi,” Patil said.

The writer is former editor of Gujarat’s oldest (156-year-old) vernacular newspaper, ‘Gujaratmitra’.