A couple of months before the assembly elections in Gujarat, the main opposition Congress started a gimmick of sorts. It promised an affordable housing scheme, in the unlikely case of the party coming to power. It didn’t end there: it started distributing application forms for this promised scheme, called Ghar-nu Ghar, a Gujarati idiom meaning one’s own house. It was former CM Shankarsinh Vaghela’s brainwave.

The response the not-likely-to-be-implemented scheme generated was phenomenal. People queued up for hours to submit their forms in towns across the state and there were even stampedes in some places, an old woman died in one of them.

Chief minister, and prime minister in waiting, Narendra Modi is usually not perturbed, not by the state Congress, during the last 11 years. In the two previous assembly elections of 2002 and 2007, he was the one to set the agenda of the campaign debates. Was the Congress finally getting one up on him? The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers hinted during the recent weeks that the party manifesto would have to match the Congress offer.

It has. In the ‘sankalp patra’ (pledge document) as the manifesto is titled, the BJP has promised to build 59 lakh homes for the needy in rural and urban areas at the cost of Rs 33,000 crore. One step further, it has also promised to revive the virtually defunct housing department.

Since this is Modi’s initiative, expect a corporate angle: the scheme will be implemented in the public-private partnership (PPP) mode, a sort of backdoor privatisation, with ‘sops’ (whatever it means) for private developers. The Congress immediately alleged that the scheme was meant to benefit builders more than the poor.

Home-buyers has a choice now: the average cost of the BJP houses would come to Rs 66,000, whereas for the Congress houses there are three options costing Rs 70,000, Rs 1 lakh and Rs 1.8 lakh.

Releasing the document along with Arun Jaitley and other party leaders in Ahmedabad on December 3, Modi said his government had built 22 lakh houses for the poor in 11 years against 12 lakh houses during 40 years of the Congress rule.

In these 11 years, Modi has been accused of a whole range of things, but populism – of the Tamil Nadu variety – was not one of them. Offers and counter-offers of free rice and TV sets and laptops that M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalitha have been known for was replicated in many parts of the country with local innovations, most recently by the Samajwadi party in Uttar Pradesh. But Gujarat voters have not been at the receiving end of such bribes. Now they are.

Unlike 2002 and 2007, Modi seems to be under extra pressure in 2012. It could be just because he is playing for bigger stakes, namely prime ministerial candidature of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). But it could also be because a number of risk factors are arraigned before him: ‘development fatigue’ among voters, a bit of anti-incumbency, former CM Keshubhai Patel’s new Gujarat Parivartan Party and a somewhat resurgent Congress.

Though, like mutual funds, past track record may not be an indicator of future, but Modi is not new to risk factors. In 2002 and 2007, he proved many doubters wrong. Bookies, no wonder, see him sailing through comfortably.