What made Congress and AAP lose badly in Gujarat Elections?

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has swept the 2022 Gujarat assembly election by winning a record 156 seats. This result broke the earlier record of 149 seats set by Congress in the 1985 assembly polls. Meanwhile, this time, Congress lost severely in Gujarat and has won back Himachal Pradesh following a close contest with BJP, while AAP secured only a few seats in its debut in Gujarat, becoming a National Party.

The Election Commission has declared the results for all 182 assembly constituencies in Gujarat. The BJP stormed back to power with an unprecedented and outstanding mandate of 156 seats compared to 99 in the last 2017 elections. The Congress got poorly defeated by securing only 17 seats from the previous 77. The Aam Aadmi Party won 5 seats. Independent candidates won 3 seats, while the Samajwadi Party surprisingly got 1 which had no presence in Gujarat.

Though many reasons bagged this great victory into BJP's account, the few major ones are related to the local Politics of Gujarat. Many internal issues and dissents were ongoing in Gujarat during the last 2017 assembly elections. However, the BJP still managed to get the majority with 99 seats in a close contest with Congress and formed the Government. The State of Gujarat has always been a bastion of the BJP. Still, during the last Elections, it had a major emotive issue of Massive Patidar Agitation, which had stood Patels in favor of Congress and helped Congress get 41% vote share in the last elections and got 77 seats.

This time, the scenario was reversed entirely as BJP got Patel's votes back, and the Patidar movement does not exist now. Even the most popular Patidar leader - Hardik Patel, has joined BJP. Additionally, the BJP had chosen famous youth faces this time with a fierce campaign of PM Modi and HM Amit Shah, and CM Yogi Adityanath has had this big win for the BJP. With this, a weak campaign from the Congress side and AAP debut have taken over a significant chunk of Congress vote share that contributed to Congress's downfall and BJP's rise in Gujarat again.

In the end, if looking at both State Election results, these elections have brought up a piece of good news in one way or another for everyone. BJP got a great historic win in Gujarat, and Congress got much-needed relief in the form of a Himachal Pradesh win. At the same time, AAP, just being a new party, bagged the stature of the National Party and made a fine debut with 5 seats in Gujarat.