Varanasi or Vadodara: What will Narendra Modi choose if he wins both seats?

Ramesh Shah, a shopkeeper in the old city area of Dandiya Bazaar, echoes the sentiment of thousands of other Barodians — most citizens of Vadodara refer to themselves as Barodians — when he declares: “As a Barodian I would prefer that Modi choose Baroda over Varanasi.”

The fear is palpable in Gujarat’s cultural capital that Modi may decide to hold the strategically vital Varanasi and let go of the BJP stronghold in his home state. It’s not just emotional bonding that’s making Barodians pine for Modi; they’re hoping that he can develop the infrastructure of Vadodara, which lags its peers like Rajkot, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Surat.

Varanasi and Vadodara are poles apart not just in direction but as political constituencies. “Vote-bank politics or caste-based voting is absent amongst urban Barodian voters,” points out Digy Thomas, a former insurance executive turned plastic recycling entrepreneur. Few in Varanasi would be able to make such a claim; after all if Hindutva’s poster boy has been chosen for the holy city, it’s because he can consolidate the Hindu upper caste votes and storm to victory.

If winning from Varanasi will be easy for Modi, giving up the seat won’t be. That’s because, as a Vadodara-based politician who did not want to be named explains, leaving Varanasi will be projected as a betrayal and Modi will be projected as a “bhagoda” (deserter) by the other parties in Uttar Pradesh.

What’s more, BJP would be confident of holding its own in Vadodara even without Modi. After all, since 1991, it has won five out of the six parliamentary elections. The party lost only in 1996 when Jitendra Sukhadia was defeated by Congress candidate Satyajitsinh Gaekwad by a narrow margin. In 2009, the current sitting MP Balkrishna Shukla won the seat by a margin of 1,36,028 votes, the highest in the state. Currently, BJP is ruling all local bodies, whether it is the municipal corporation, zilla panchayat or taluka panchayat. As Thomas, a Kerala-born and brought up in Vadodara, says if Modi does choose Varanasi, any BJP candidate will stroll to a win in a by-election.