Modi’s trusted man who revived Gujarat BJP after 2017 slump

Chandrakant Raghunath Patil, who is set to step down as Gujarat BJP chief after a successful stint of more than five years – including two-plus years on extension – had been a surprise choice for the job. Originally from Jalgaon in Maharashtra, Patil, or CR as he is more commonly known, was the first “non-Gujarati” to hold the post.
That there were few raised eyebrows was not a surprise, given Patil’s own long tenure in Gujarat, with the former police constable making his way up the rungs, and given the say of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah in the state where the BJP has grown and grown. Plus, Patil was seen as Modi’s pick.
The 70-year-old took over in July 2020 while the BJP was still recovering from the 2017 Assembly polls, where the Patidar agitation had reduced the party to 99 seats in the 182-member House, and to a thin majority. Patil also took over amidst the first Covid wave, when public sentiments against the government ran high.
Months after his appointment, in November 2020, Gujarat saw bypolls to eight Assembly seats vacated by Congress MLAs who had defected to the BJP. The BJP won all.
Patil would go on to oversee the stunning decision to remake the entire Gujarat Cabinet ahead of the 2022 Assembly elections, starting from the top with the late Vijay Rupani replaced as Chief Minister, the replacement of many sitting MLAs with new faces, and the implementation of age and tenure criteria for ticket distribution in local body elections.
Successive polls proved Patil’s deftness in ensuring that the changes didn’t backfire. In March 2021, the BJP convincingly won the local body elections, including all the six municipal corporations. In October 2021, the party didn’t just wrest the Congress bastion of Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation, but swept it, winning from 41 of the 44 wards.
Then came the 2022 Assembly polls, which were seen as a litmus test of whether the BJP’s overhaul of its state unit would help it duck anti-incumbency, and if it had put the 2017 results behind. The BJP defied naysayers on both counts by winning the Assembly elections with the largest-ever majority in Gujarat’s history (156, or 85% of the Assembly seats).
When Patil’s three-year tenure ended in July 2023, the BJP gave him an extension, choosing to go with him for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Patil delivered again, with the BJP – despite setbacks in other parts of the country – winning 25 of the 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat.

Move to Delhi

When Modi returned to power as PM in 2024, Paatil was inducted into the Union Cabinet as Minister for Jal Shakti. Since then, his stepping down as Gujarat BJP chief was imminent. The party, however, struggled to find an adequate replacement.
Among the frontrunners for the next Gujarat BJP chief, who is expected to be a “consensus” choice, is state minister Jagdish Vishwakarma or Jagdish Panchal, an OBC leader and MLA from Ahmedabad.
As chief, Patil’s initiatives in the Gujarat BJP included setting up ‘page committees’ across the state. Each panel was in-charge of a list of committed party supporters per page of an electoral roll. Modi expressed his appreciation for the move in a letter to the BJP Gujarat unit.
Patil introduced the concept of having a party mandate for local body polls, and put in place a system for greater interaction between BJP ministers and party workers and the people.
The moves that didn’t go down as well were the Gujarat Cattle Control (Keeping and Moving) in Urban Areas Bill, 2022, which was seen as Patil’s idea and which had to be withdrawn amid protests by the Maldhari community. Similarly, a project to interlink the Par, Tapi and Narmada waters, which Patil reportedly backed, was put in abeyance following protests by tribals.
Another time Patil courted controversy was in April 2021, when amid a dire shortage of the antiviral drug Remdesivir during the second wave of Covid-19, he announced that he would distribute 5,000 vials of it to the needy, from the Surat BJP office.
The details of the decision to remove two powerful general secretaries of the state unit, Bhargav Bhatt and Pradipsinh Vaghela, remain unknown. The two posts still lie vacant.
Despite the rows, a senior BJP leader said: “I would rate Patil as the best president the party has ever had. He introduced a killer instinct in the state unit, to never give up, and the use of data to manage polls. He filled party posts down to the bottom that had been lying vacant for long.”
The party leader added that Patil’s style may have been “my way or the highway”, but ultimately the BJP gained. “He knows how to get things done. And he did that.”
Another party leader said, “You may disagree with Patil’s style of functioning, but no one can deny that he revived the BJP after the near debacle of the 2017 assembly elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.”