BJP wins 47 of 75 Gujarat civic poll seats, Cong gets 16

Nominee for Gorakhpur is not temple priest

GANDHINAGAR:

Gujarat’s ruling BJP won the most seats in municipal elections on Monday, but has lost ground compared to the last elections five years ago. The party has won 47 of 75 municipalities for which elections were held; it had won 59 in 2013.

Principal rival Congress has won 16 municipalities, five more than the 11 it had won last time. It had lost five of them two years later when its leaders defected to the BJP and are claiming Monday’s result as a major gain. The party claimed that it also supported four Independents who have won and so its tally is 20.

Six municipalities did not give a clear mandate to either party, and the Congress has asserted that it will gather the support needed to form the municipal board in each of them.

The BJP’S loss of 12 municipalities comes just two months after the party posted its weakest performance in years in assembly elections held in December last. The party won a fifth straight term in power in Gujarat, but not before a real fright as the Congress seemed to catch up several times, eventually reducing the BJP’S margin of victory.

In some good news for the ruling party, it has won 27 of 28 seats in the municipality in Vadnagar, the hometown of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with the Congress being able to win only one seat. The BJP had lost the Vadnagar seat in the assembly elections.

The BJP has fielded a candidate from outside the Gorakhnath temple for UP’S Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat after almost three decades on Monday.

The saffron party announced its candidates for the Lok Sabha by-elections next month, fielding seasoned organisational leader Upendra Shukla for Gorakhpur and former Varanasi mayor and State secretary Kaushlendra Singh Patel as the candidate for Phulpur seat. Congress and Samajwadi Party have already announced their candidates for both the seats.

The bye-elections in UP has been necessitated by the resignation of CM Yogi Adityanath and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya from Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats, respectively, in September last year following their election to UP Legislative Council.

Tuesday is the last day for filing the nominations. Counting of votes will take place on March 14.

Upendra Shukla, who is currently Gorakhpur’s region president of BJP, has served as the party’s district president in the past. For the last 29 years, Gorakhpur has been represented in LS by the head priest of Gorakhnath temple, which is the most prominent Hindu pilgrimage centre in eastern UP.

Adityanath’s guru Mahant Avaidyanth was elected from Gorakhpur LS seat in 1989 as a Hindu Mahasabha nominee. He was elected for next two consecutive terms, 1991 and 1996, as a BJP nominee. Avaidyanath’s successor as head priest of the temple, Adityanath, won the seat as BJP’S candidate for five consecutive elections, defeating SP in 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2014, and BSP in 2009. Madan Pandey of Congress was the last non-bjp MP elected from Gorakhpur, in 1984.

BJP had so far been relying on the Gorakhnath temple for selection of a candidate for Gorakhpur LS seat, considering the temple’s follower base and the clout of its head priest.

BJP’S Phulpur nominee Kaushlendra Singh Patel, from OBC community, is party’s state secretary for the second consecutive term. He was elected as mayor from Varanasi in 2006, when the mayoral seat of the city was reserved for backward castes. Patel has earlier worked in RSS’S student wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP) as well. Sources said that Patel is close to deputy CM Maurya, who played a key role in getting the party’s Lok Sabha ticket for him.

The saffron party declared the names of the candidates after a meeting was held in this regard on Sunday evening in Delhi. Party national president Amit Shah, UP CM Adityanath and party state president Mahendra Nath Pandey attended the meet and discussed probable names for the bye-elections. Sources said that for Gorakhpur, the name of regional unit secretary Dharmendra Singh also came up. discussed. Singh is considered close to Adityanath, who had proposed Singh’s name for the mayor nominee as well in recent urban body elections, but the party had denied him ticket.