Ahmedabad: No cameras, no posters and a quiet typical of summer afternoons in the cities of Gujarat, the entryway leading to her residence in one of the lanes of Ahmedabad’s CG Road is nothing like one would expect of a candidate fighting Lok Sabha elections, especially not if the fight is against Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
It’s checkmate even before the game begins, many from the constituency say, but Sonal Patel, the Congress’s candidate for Gandhinagar, insists it is “not a political suicide, but rather a challenge”.
An architect who joined the Congress in 1992, 62-year-old Patel is in a huddle with four of her trusted aides, preparing for her public meeting in the evening. “Fighting Lok Sabha elections is a completely different ballgame. We have to walk the talk,” she tells ThePrint, adding that she never asked the party to give her a ticket.
She is in a direct battle against Shah, who won from the same seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections — his first time contesting the general elections — by over five lakh votes, and is now targeting a victory with a “record margin of 10 lakh”. If the seat being held by the home minister who is pulling out all stops wasn’t already a herculean challenge, picture this — the BJP has not only retained this seat since 1989, it is also from here that party bigwigs like L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee secured victories.
“I see this as an opportunity to connect with the people here, not as a risk,” says Patel, adding that if she would have contested and lost from a seat that is a Congress stronghold, she would have been questioned. “But even the Congress party knows Gandhinagar is a challenging seat, they wanted a person with integrity here. See what happened in the case of Rohan Gupta or in Surat. What if such a thing happened here and Amit Shah wins uncontested. He has a dream to win with a record margin and he can go to any length to achieve it.”
Last month, Mukesh Dalal, the BJP candidate from Surat got elected to the Lower House unopposed after eight nominations were withdrawn and two were rejected. In March, the Congress’s Ahmedabad East candidate Rohan Gupta suddenly resigned. Gupta later joined the BJP.
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‘They told me to fight from any other seat’
For Sonal Patel, the challenges go beyond the political battleground. “I started crowdfunding for my campaign. But even my family members are scared to donate or pitch in. They are scared of action if anyone from the BJP gets to know about it. Builders were reluctant to give space to set up my office. I have had to get a renovation done at my parents’ home, and now I am working out of there,” she says, recalling how many, including her neighbours, questioned her decision. “They told me to fight on any other seat if I wanted to contest the polls.”
Navnirman leader Umakant Mankad, who has been with the Congress for over 50 years, says the party puts loyalty, education above everything else, and also decided to go with a woman candidate. “For the first time, the Congress has made an appropriate exercise of who to field from where. I have known Sonal Patel since she was a teenager, she got political knowledge from early days due to her father.”
With a Post Graduate Diploma in Planning from the CEPT University, Patel runs a firm with her husband, but politics is neither new to her, nor was it once a preferred choice. “My father was a municipal councillor in the Naranpura area. He was a doctor, he left everything, stopped his practice and joined politics. We had financial problems as we never thought we should earn money from politics, but I also wondered why we should have a frugal lifestyle when we are all professionals with good education.”
For the longest time, Patel wasn’t interested in politics, but after her father passed away in 1989, it was former chief minister Chimanbhai Patel who convinced her to take the plunge. Her husband Anirudh K. Dutta says, “I was present at the meeting between Chimanbhai Patel and her. I had suggested back then that she should join the BJP, since that was an era when the party was seeing a rise, especially in Gujarat. But the final decision about what she does was and is always hers. She joined politics, and over the years has managed her professional journey along with it, as well as our family.”
Sonal Patel was president of the Gujarat Mahila Congress Committee for six years between 2012 and 2018, and is now the AICC secretary and Congress party co-incharge for Mumbai and western Maharashtra. A vocal advocate for more participation of women in politics, the 62-year-old has the odds stacked against her. She will fight the electoral battle on 7 May against a formidable heavyweight, who is also someone she has known for over three decades.
“I have known Amit Shah since I was in my late 20s. Amit Shah worked at the grassroots level in the same area (Naranpura) where my father was a corporator, where I used to live and started work,” she says.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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