
Over a week ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorted voters in Amreli in Gujarat’s Saurashtra to not “waste” their votes again. “What did they do for you these last five years, tell me? Do you remember even one piece of work they did? Then why are you wasting your votes on them? To strengthen Amreli, I urge you to choose the lotus, the BJP’s election symbol, this time,” he told an election rally on November 20.
By “they”, Modi meant the Congress, which won all five of Amreli district’s Assembly seats in 2017. Buoyed by the Patidar agitation for reservation and GST woes, the grand old party snapped up 28 of the 48 seats in Saurashtra. Five years earlier, in 2012, Amreli had elected two legislators each from the Congress and the BJP and one from the Gujarat Parivartan Party.