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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Aug 09, 2017, 07:56 AM IST
It has been a nail-biter of a day and by the time this edit was being penned, the suspense over counting of the votes cast by Gujarat Legislative Assembly members remained unresolved. Precariously balanced on the outcome of this poll is the political career of Sonia Gandhi's political secretary Ahmed Patel, and the electoral prestige of his boss.
Even in the run up to the polls, the contest was being projected as one not between BJP president Amit Shah and Patel, but between Shah and Sonia Gandhi. Failure to elect Patel to Rajya Sabha is a setback that the Congress will not be able to brush off. If the events of this tortuous day attest to one undisputed fact, it is this: That the Gujarat Congress, as well as the Congress headquarters, are deeply insecure of the inroads that the BJP has made into its electoral as well as parliamentary turf.
The political drama in the run-up to the polls has been nothing short of a blockbuster movie. Be it the Congress' theatrical swooping away of Gujarat MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru or the BJP's stratagem of deploying taxmen against the Karnataka MLA, DK Shivakumar, in whose resort the Gujarat Congress' 42 MLAs were sheltered — the likes of such political manoeuvring is unprecedented. Credit here is due to the Congress, which put up a spirited fight. Evidently, a lot of pressure is being brought to bear on the Election Commission.
The BJP's top brass: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Power Minister Piyush Goyal, Law and Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had all descended on the Election Commission office in New Delhi. Even the Congress bigwigs, including Chidambaram, were stationed at the EC to take up cudgels on behalf of Patel. Congress has been painted into a corner and is ferociously sticking to the argument that the votes of two of its MLAs, who displayed their ballot papers to the BJP agent present at the polling site, should be invalidated.
Patel was essentially counting on 44 MLAs to vote for him. Previously, he could have counted on the vote of 51MLAs, but the souring of relations between rebel faction leader Shankersinh Vaghela and the Congress affected his chances. If reports of one of the 44 MLAs voting against him turn out to be true, then Patel's chances are spoilt further. In that case, his hope of making it to the RS rests on Chhotubhai Vasava, the JD(U) MLA and two other NCP MLAs. While Vasava claims that he voted for Patel, his party has declared that he voted for the BJP. By the way, the one individual absent from this entire drama was Rahul Gandhi, apparently down with fever.
