THE CHALLENGER: The leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, brought his new aggressive self to the Modi-Shah lair on Saturday and said the BJP should prepare to be ousted from power in Gujarat.

Virtually sounding the Gujarat poll bugle more than three years in advance, Rahul cited the Ayodhya win by the INDIA bloc to assert that ending the Congress’s three-decade-old drought in the state was doable. He was addressing a party workers’ convention in Ahmedabad.

This was the second time in less than a week that Rahul had asserted that the Congress would win the next Gujarat Assembly elections. The first instance was in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah.

“We will defeat you in Gujarat this time. Take it in writing. The Opposition, INDIA bloc, is going to defeat you in Gujarat,” Rahul had said in his speech during the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President’s address.

He repeated the claim in Gujarat on Saturday, seeking to rev up the party apparatus after the vandalisation of the Congress office in Ahmedabad as a retaliation to his speech in Parliament.

Posters of Rahul in a skull cap calling “Hindus violent” — a misrepresentation of what he had said in the Lok Sabha — were plastered on the Congress office in Ahmedabad the following day after the BJP, led by Modi, spun his remarks to project them as “anti-Hindu”.

Rahul had sought to draw a distinction between an accommodative Hinduism, as practised by most Hindus, and the BJP’s political project.

Stating the BJP had challenged the Congress by attacking the party office, Rahul said he saw an opportunity in this act. He reminded the gathering of the 2017 Assembly elections when the Congress bagged 77 of the 182 seats in the state.

Sounding confident and aggressive, he also sought to give the state unit a reality check, stressing the need to distribute tickets to warhorses rather than deadwood (using the metaphor of racehorses and those used by bridegrooms in north Indian weddings).

As always, he used his “daro mat (fear not)” refrain, underlining the Congress legacy of fighting the British. The substance of his speech was that the Congress in Gujarat does not need to fear the BJP.

“We did not fight the 2022 elections, so we did poorly. In 2017, we fought for three months and were just 15 short of the halfway mark. Imagine what we can achieve in three years,” Rahul said.

Assembly polls in Gujarat are expected at the end of 2027.

Although the Congress has been out of power in Gujarat since 1995, the party still has a sizable vote share in the state. It dipped below 30 per cent in 2022, courtesy the AAP walking away with almost 13 per cent of the anti-BJP vote.

But the Congress vote share crossed 30 per cent in Gujarat this general election, apart from picking up a seat after a decade.