Friends, please give us Gujaratis another chance in 2019. We deserve it and it is in your best interests, we assure you, whether or not you may accept this. For the following reasons:

For one, you haven’t yet seen the best of us. We are only in second gear and have had but five years at the wheel (as opposed to the 67 years for the rest of you). Hasn’t the ship of state been steered noticeably better since 2014? There is hardly a thing that one can point out where we have not outperformed the norm and created history.

Moving on, our strong posture on defence has upended the strategic narrative on the subcontinent. There were as many as 165 fatalities in the Indian armed forces in 2014 across the nation when we took over. Last year, there were only 183.

In Kashmir, you will be shocked to hear that in 2014, we sacrificed 46 soldiers to martyrdom. But last year there were only 95. Further, it will enthuse you to know that from 26 ‘civilians’ (pelters, anti-nationals etc), we rid our country of 95 ‘civilians’ last year. Think of how it might have been without the Surgical Strike.

The Maoist insurgency claimed a massive and unsustainable 85 lives in 2014 but we were able to bring it under control and the number last year stood at only 217. Big win! Deaths are lower in the northeast, but if we did not have interference from the Supreme Court, enforcing a total ban on fake encounters, we could have changed the dynamic there too. Shame on those anti-nationals who moved the court.

Elsewhere, in foreign policy, we have mended relations with Nepal — fully and successfully undoing the blockade that made them suffer serious deprivation in 2015! — and with Bhutan — which has more official tourists, both Chinese and Indian, on their borders since 2017 — and with Bangladesh — thanks to our outstanding Citizenship Amendment Bill — plus other triumphs in Maldives, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. By the way, this is not even including all the moments of rapture we have achieved with the desi populations in foreign parts. We must be modest and we will be: noblesse oblige.

On jobs we are told that unemployment is at “a four-decade high” without any emphasis on the triumphal adjective ‘high’, there being no rewards for overachieving in these doubting and hating times when all-time highs are a bad portent. The other thing is that four-decade high obviously means that we are at the same place where we were in 1972, a seminal year in which, lest we forget, we partitioned and dissected our enemy. How can being back in 1972 be a bad thing? The final point here is that the data does not accommodate the women we kept out of the workplace — and temples. This is not unemployment; it is women not wanting to work because they value their cultural role at home more. Fair is fair.

On the issue of ‘lynching’, on which our ideology has been much maligned, we would like to point out the ignored positive: after centuries and indeed a full millennia of hatred and segregation, we have been able to get the two communities together, face to face, knee to solar plexus and elbow to groin. It is intimate contact that builds trust, faith and progress. Please remember this: let’s get physical!

Now friends, there is hardly room here to recount some of the absolute and uncontested triumphs but certainly, and because we are talking about Gujaratis here, we must not forget hard currency. Rokda. Our signal achievement was to get people to replace their badly designed and frankly unappealing Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes for superb and development-oriented Rs 2,000 notes. The decision was such a hit that people queued up for weeks to get their hands on these notes and that cannot be disputed. They could not wait to get rid of those old UPA bills. Indeed, and even this is not something that can be argued against, nobody and absolutely nobody, wants to use those old notes today.

Friends, let us summarise this now. You have a choice from across this vast and great nation but think about this: who else can you possibly elect? The Bengalis are good at protest and poetry and mishti and we have never denied that. The folks from Uttar Pradesh have a sort of country bumpkin appeal but how many followers have they on Twitter and how many editions of Mann Ki Baat can they possibly fill (with those accents)? How many hours can they speak uninterrupted and uninterruptible in the Lok Sabha? One does not know when Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, and not to mention Rajasthan, were last taken seriously. And the South Indians are… well the South Indians.

But what about ‘Good Governance®’, what about ‘Development®’ and what about ‘Good Days®’?

Friends, if you care about these, please bring us back.