Nearly two-thirds of people in Gujarat are satisfied (to some extent or completely) with the performance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, says the latest Lokniti-CSDS survey. The remaining one-third, the survey says, expressed dissatisfaction (in whole or in part) with the government’s performance.
In the survey, conducted from October 10 to 23, a total of 2,135 voters across 80 polling stations in 20 constituencies were randomly selected and interviewed.
In 2017, it was recorded that only 8 per cent of the people were completely happy with the government. This number jumped to 31 per cent in the fresh survey.
Findings of the new survey reveal that the rich and the middle-class are most satisfied with the current government’s performance compared to the lower and those below poverty line.
The Gujarat Assembly elections 2022 that will see polling in two phases, December 1 and 5, the BJP has intensified its campaign since both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah belong to the poll-bound state.
Gujarat elections were always a tussle between the two national parties—BJP and Congress. But this time, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has entered the game. When Lokniti-CSDS asked survey respondents whether Gujarat needs a third alternative other than Congress and BJP, around 62 per cent were in agreement. Only 24 per cent of them said no, and 15 per cent did not respond.
The survey says 61 per cent of Congress voters want an alternative political party, to which 54 per cent of BJP voters and 72 per cent AAP voters are in favour. This shows that AAP has convinced a large section of the voters in the state that there is a need for a third alternative, which could mean AAP itself.
About 57 per cent of Gujarat’s population is women. When asked whether the state government has managed to protect their interests, approximately 56 per cent of the women replied in the affirmative.
Lokniti is a research programme established in 1997 by the CSDS. It houses a cluster of research initiatives that seek to engage with national and global debates on democratic politics by initiating empirically grounded yet theoretically oriented studies. By bringing various projects of the CSDS on elections, democratic politics, and party politics together under a single programme, Lokniti seeks to engage with global debates on democracy. Mahashweta Jani coordinated the fieldwork of the survey and Siddhraj Parmar in Gujarat supervised it.
