Yes, ultimately,Modi turned out to be a brilliant salesman. His Gujrati Asmita card played emotionally to the already polarized voters of the state did the trick. Of course people perceived him as a clean and no nonsense administrator. In cricketing terms , as a local player he read the Gujrat PITCH correctly and won the match with handsome margin. Furtherr, he cleverly exploited the emotional issues of the Congress campaign to his advantage. Ironically, the media also played a big part in propping up Modi to such a cult figure. But his claims on development are nothing to crow about. Modi might have delivered on development but so it has been in Gujrat under any chief minister .Even when the rest of the country was languishing till the nineties, Gujrat was in the forefront of development, thanks to the entrepreneurship of the Gujrati people. Modi has not achieved any spectacularly different results. Congress failure: On the other hand the Congress team was like a foreign team playing under unfamiliar pitch conditions and crashed to a humiliating defeat. Moral of the story : to win a state election , the Congress party must have a local team with a competent captain familiar with the pitch and local conditions. Leaders paratrooping might have worked for Nehru, Indira , Rajiv etc. whose stature were much higher and also perhaps then the LOCAL PITCHES were flatter and not this treacherous but it is certainly not going to w
