National trends reflected in the BJP’s twin victories in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh are as apparent as they are subliminal in their granular detail and political outline. The most obvious trend highlighted by BJP President Amit Shah is that the ruling party has maintained the momentum in its victory run by snatching Himachal from the Congress and registering a sixth consecutive win in Gujarat. The Congress, with its depleted social support base and sliding national vote share — it is placed third or worse in ten major States accounting for 59 per cent of (or 320) Lok Sabha seats — looks like it’s struggling for political survival. But there is a subtext which makes sense only when voter trends around political economy issues are examined closely. For the first time in the last two decades, the Congress has seized an issue and shown willingness to forge social alliances around it.

The issue is that of a deep rural distress and agrarian crisis that has boiled over across States with communities related to farming — Jats in Haryana, Marathas in Maharashtra, Kapus in Andhra-Telangana and the Patidars in Gujarat — expressing it in mammoth silent marches, violent clashes and the metamorphosis of community-based structures such as the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) into political entities. The expression of this distress, especially by PAAS, was thus far limited to demands for agitation but election campaign in Gujarat showed that it can easily force the discourse on related political economy issues like jobless growth, lack of public health and education facilities and rural infrastructure. The Congress led by Rahul Gandhi channelled this angst effectively, leading to a reversal of the dominant electoral trend in rural Saurashtra. Prime Minister Modi campaigned on emotive and communal issues, neutralising rural/agrarian angst in cities like Surat, Vadodara and Ahmedabad through as many as 37 public rallies. But he was still not able to bridge the rural/urban divide in Gujarat. Trends till late Monday night showed that the BJP held sway in big, prosperous cities like Surat and Ahmedabad, retaining all the 12 seats in the South Gujarat city and registering record margins in the capital city. In seats like Choriyasi in Surat and Ellisbridge in Ahmedabad, the BJP won by staggering margins of 1,10,819 and 85,205 votes, respectively. The contrast could not have been sharper with the Congress winning as many as four seats out of five in semi-rural Surendranagar and five out of five in Amreli, both in Saurashtra.

The PM and the BJP’s superior organisational mettle have undoubtedly defeated the Congress . But if Rahul Gandhi can get the Patidars, essentially a farming community which created the BJP in Gujarat, to cross over and cause reversals in this highly urbanised State, it can certainly be interpreted as a fillip to politics around agrarian woes and related economic issues in upcoming elections in Karnataka, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, all with relatively higher rural populations.

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