People fed up with state leaders of BJP and corruption: Isudan Gadhvi

Khambhalia (Gujarat): With the BJP building its campaign around Prime Minister Narendra Modi, AAP's chief ministerial candidate Isudan Gadhvi on Saturday said this shows how people of Gujarat are fed-up with the ruling party's state leaders and claimed his party is on course to end its uninterrupted reign of nearly 25 years.

In an interview with PTI, the journalist-turned-politician asserted that the people of Gujarat will vote for a credible leader as their next chief minister in the assembly polls in which, he noted, Modi will not be a factor in their mind.

"Modi is prime minister and he will remain in power at the Centre till 2024. The assembly polls are for electing the state government. People of Gujarat are fed up with state leaders of the BJP and the Congress. There is no mass leader among them while I am drawing support in every part of the state," he said.

While some poll watchers believe that 40-year-old Gadhvi, once a popular Gujarati news anchor, has been caught in a tough fight in Khambhalia and social equations are also not very favourable to him, he said the AAP's poll entry has meant that conventional calculations will not work in either his constituency or in Gujarat.

Though he is seen as a decent person with public connect, owed in some parts to his TV background, some critics have also described his party as a "general without soldiers", a pointer to the suggestion that it may lack the ground network to match the well-entrenched poll machinery of its rivals, especially the BJP, despite having a visible leadership.

Gadhvi, though, was quick to dismiss any such suggestions and cited figures to back his claim of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) emerging as a credible challenger to the BJP in the state.

He claimed that the AAP has established its committees of 11-15 persons in each of the nearly 52,000 booths in the state and over 50 lakh voters have physically collected "guarantees" (manifesto) his party has promised to deliver if elected to power.

"We do not believe in the old pattern of politics practiced by the BJP and the Congress in which panchayat members and local caste leaders were co-opted by them during the polls to collect votes. Ground workers are with us and so are people. It will be reflected in the poll results on December 8," he said.

In terms of the current popular vote share estimate, the AAP is ahead of the BJP while the Congress is far behind, Gadhvi claimed.

Gadhvi, who comes from Other Backward Classes (OBC), described himself as the "son of a farmer" and said the AAP's three promises of "bijli, pani and daam" (power, water and remunerative prices for produce) have won it the support of the agrarian community.

While farmers are generally supplied electricity in night for irrigation purposes, the AAP has promised it during the daytime.

Gadhvi said the party's promises of free power to people besides filling up government jobs which, he said, are around two lakh, and boosting education and health sectors as its leader Arvind Kejriwal has "done" in Delhi besides monthly allowances to women and unemployed youth have struck a chord with people.

While the BJP ran a "corrupt" government in Gujarat, the Congress, he alleged, failed in its role as an opposition by not raising the issues of people effectively.

The AAP has sparked hope among the people of the state, and they will give it a chance to rule the state, he claimed.

Gadhvi's assembly seat Khambhalia falls in the Saurashtra region, which will go to polls in the first phase on December 1 along with south Gujarat and Kutch.

The rest of the parts of the state will vote on December 5 and counting will take place on December 8.