Gujarat election results 2024: Congress opens account after a decade

Gujarat BJP workers celebrating the party’s victory at the party headquarters Kamalam in Gandhinagar on Tuesday.
| Photo Credit: VIJAY SONEJI

For the first time since the 2014 Lok Sabha election, the Congress has opened its account by winning the Parliamentary seat of Banaskantha in PM Modi’s home State of Gujarat. The Banaskantha seat encompasses a rural district with large population that sustains itself through dairy farming.

Two time Congress MLA Geniben Thakor won the Banaskantha seat by defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rekhaben Chaudhary, a political novice.

Ms. Thakor is the first woman candidate to win the seat since 1962. She is also the first female candidate from the Thakor community, a rural community engaged in farming in north Gujarat, to win the seat.

“I am thankful to the people of Banaskantha for reposing faith in me and defeating the BJP’s money and muscle power and rampant misuse of cooperative institutions like the Banaskantha Dairy and Banaskantha District Cooperative Bank,” she said after being declared as the winner.

In the neighbouring Patna seat, the Congress candidate Chandani Thakor lost by a slender margin while in Sabarkantha, the Congress legislator Tushar Chaudhary lost the seat.

“It is a setback losing Banaskantha,” a BJP leader told The Hindu.

“It is the defeat of BJP’s arrogance and large scale corruption. The party rampantly misused the cooperative institutions for political purposes and lost in Banaskantha,” State Congress chief Shaktisinh Gohil said.

The Congress victory in Banaskantha has stunned the BJP in the State which was hoping to register a hattrick by winning all 26 Lok Sabha seats from the State.

In fact, it was in Banaskantha where Prime Minister Narendra Modi made remarks claiming that the Congress would take away one buffalo if it won the Lok Sabha election while referring to the ‘inheritance tax’, a political issue during the Lok Sabha election campaign.

The contest in Banaskantha became all the more intense and divisive because of Shankar Chaudhary, the State Assembly speaker and chairman of Banas Dairy and vice chairman of Gujarat State Cooperative Bank. The BJP nominee Rekha Chaudhary was a protégé of Shankar Chaudhary, who had lost to Ms. Thakor in the 2017 Assembly election from the Vav Assembly seat.

In the 2022 Assembly election, Mr. Chaudhary had changed his seat from Vav to Tharad to avoid the fight against Ms. Thakor, who won in 2022 also.

Overall, the BJP won 24 seats on Tuesday while Surat seat it had already won uncontested after the Congress candidate’s nomination papers were rejected on technicalities while other candidates had opted out from the race.

In Gandhinagar; the Union Home Minister Amit Shah won the seat with whopping seven lakh marching while the State BJP chief CR Paatil won from Navsari with 7.5 lakh margin.

Except Banaskantha, Patan, and Anand, the BJP won all other seats comfortably including Bharuch where the BJP’s senior most parliamentarian Mansukh Vasava was pitted against Aam Aadmi Party’s first time legislator Chaitar Vasava.

Another seat the AAP contested was Bhavnagar where its sitting legislator Umesh Makwana lost to the BJP’s Nimuben Bambhania.

Also, two cabinet Ministers – Parshottam Rupala and Mansukh Mandaviya – won from Rajkot and Porbandar respectively while Minister of State for Communication Devusinh Chauhan won from the Kheda seat in central Gujarat.

In south Gujarat, also, the ruling party won all the seats including ST reserved Valsad and Bardoli.

In central Gujarat, the ruling party won Vadodara, Dahod, Panchamahal, and Chhota Udepur seats.

Interestingly, in the neighbouring Union Territory seat of Daman and Diu, the BJP candidate lost to independent candidate Umesh Patel.

The loss in the Union Territory seat also assumes significance because in 2009, 2014, and 2019, the ruling party had been winning the seat. The Union Territory seat of Dadra and Nagar Haveli was won by the BJP’s Kalaben Delakar. She was a sitting MP from Shiv Sena, who had joined the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha election.

Earlier, her husband and Parliamentarian Mohan Delkar, had committed suicide in a hotel in Mumbai. In the subsequent byelection, his widow contested on Shiv Sena and had won in 2022.