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AAP’s Gujarat face is a rebel from BJP who took on Modi
AHMEDABAD: When Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal touches down in Gujarat on Saturday to inaugurate the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) campaign in the state for next
AHMEDABAD: When Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal touches down in Gujarat on Saturday to inaugurate the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) campaign in the state for next year’s polls, he will be relying on an unusual ally: Former BJP legislator Kanu Kalsaria.
The AAP has big plans in Gujarat, the home state of PM Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah, and 62-year-old Kalsaria has emerged as Kejriwal’s principal point person. Hundreds of posters plastered in Saurashtra welcoming Kejriwal also feature the three-term MLA from coastal town of Mahuva who fell out with the BJP over farmers’ issues.
The AAP has announced it will contest 182 seats in the elections due next year and Kejriwal’s whistle-stop tour of Saurashtra is being viewed as the virtual launch of the party’s electioneering in the state.
Kalsaria’s activist past, together with the run-ins he had with Modi during his days as the Gujarat chief minister, fit effortlessly into the AAP’s scheme of things.
The ex-BJP MLA put his career at stake when he went against the “industry-friendly” Modi government and opposed the setting up of a cement factory on a wetland.
Fighting for local farmers, Kalsaria won the battle and the plan for the factory was shelved.
But he lost political support within the BJP and ultimately lost the 2012 assembly election.
However, he didn’t give up on activism. Besides running a charity hospital in Mahuva, Kalsaria has set his eyes on opposing a mining project. Some 10,000 farmers turned up at his behest for an environmental public hearing last month over the project. “I joined BJP when ex-CM Keshubhai Patel approached me. It was his pro-farmer image and the secular standing of Atal Bihari Vajpayee that attracted me,” he says.
But disillusioned with the BJP, Kalsaria joined the AAP in 2014.
“I feel the AAP has been trying to fight corruption,” he says. “Though some leaders of AAP also came under the scanner, but they were sacked,” he points out.
Observers say Kalsaria’s pro-farmer, honest and no-nonsense image is something that AAP can use to its advantage.
Kalsaria distances himself from the 2002 Godhra train fire and the communal riots, both of which occurred during his first term as MLA. “I was never in favour of the fundamentalist stand taken by the government. But I did not say much then. After Vajpayee, saffronisation of the BJP happened,” he said.
Now, the AAP is hoping to exploit the disquiet within the farming community over poor cotton prices and inadequate power supply which apparently contributed to the BJP’s poll reverses in local body elections last year.
The choice of Saurashtra for Kejriwal’s first electoral foray into the state is significant. He will address three farmers’ rallies during the day in the region.
