Adopting a cautious approach, the ruling BJP, on Friday, announced the first list of 70 candidates , dropping only two and repeating 49 of its sitting MLAs, for the two-phase elections to be held in 182 Assembly constituencies of Gujarat in December.
In the first phase, elections will be held for 89 seats on December 9 in the Saurashtra-Kutch and South Gujarat regions while polling will be held for the remaining 93 seats on December 14 in Central and North Gujarat. Counting of votes will take place on December 18.
Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, his deputy Nitin Patel and State BJP President Jitu Vaghani will contest from their existing Rajkot-II, Mehsana and Bhavnagar-West constituencies, respectively. No minister has been dropped in the first list. Only two sitting MLAs, both women, have been dropped: Varshaben Doshi (Wadhwan, Surendranagar) and Bhavnaben Makwana (Mahua, Bhavnagar).
In the 2007 polls, the ruling BJP had dropped as many as 47 sitting MLAs while in 2012, it dropped 30 under its ubiquitous “no repeat theory” to battle anti-incumbency.
Of the 70 candidates announced on Friday, 45 will contest in the first phase and 25 in the second phase. They include 15 Patidars and four women. Four ex-Congress legislators, who joined the BJP in August in the wake of the Rajya Sabha elections, also got the tickets. The party has fielded 16 “new” faces, including ex-Congress MLAs, CK Raulji, Raghavji Patel, Dharmendrasinh Jadeja and Ramsinh Parmar, from their respective constituencies..
Significantly, the 2007 batch IPS officer PC Baranda, whose resignation was accepted by the State Government as soon as he tendered it early this week, has been fielded as BJP candidate from the reserved Bhiloda (ST) constituency in the tribal-dominated Aravalli district in North Gujarat.
For these elections, the BJP had received applications from a whopping 4,500 people seeking tickets, the average being 30 persons per seat.
Their names were finalised by the BJP’s Central Election Committee, which met in New Delhi on Wednesday. It was chaired by party chief Amit Shah and attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, among others.
Reacting to the BJP’s first list, Gujarat Pradesh Congress Spokesman Manish Doshi said the list of repeated candidates revealed the ruling party’s “panic” as it did not want to trigger “infighting” in its rank-and-file. About his own party’s candidates, he said the Congress had finalised names of 140 candidates and would announce the list at an “appropriate” time.