RUPANI, NITIN

The BJP opted to persist with their old leadership in Gujarat and unanimously reelected Vijay Rupani and Nitin Patel as chief minister and deputy chief minister, respectively, for a second term.

Rupani, who succeeded Patel, is considered close to national party chief Amit Shah while Nitin has been retained as his deputy to keep the balance in a supercharged state facing a pro-quota agitation by the Patel community. The combination has come to stay.

A meeting of the BJP legislature party held here on Friday in the presence of central observers, finance minister Arun Jaitley and party national secretary Saroj Pandey elected Rupani as the leader and Patel as his deputy. The observers later said that the decision was unanimous.

The BJP, this time, is down to its lowest tally since 1995 when veteran leader Keshubhai Patel came to form the party's first government in 1995.

It could win only 99 seats in the 182-member House with the Congress securing 77 seats and six seats going to others, including three Congress supported independents, and two seats to the Congress ally, the Bharatiya Tribal Party of Chottubhai Vasava.

For 1956 born Rupani, his return as chief minister marks a meteoric rise through the ranks of the ABVP in Rajkot to chairman of the standing committee and later mayor of the Rajkot Municipal Corporation to a stint in the Rajya Sabha in 2006.

Elected to the state assembly in 2015 after Vajubhai Vala was appointed Governor of Karnataka, he became the state party chief just months later and soon after the chief minister last year.

Nitin too is a 1956 born and was first elected legislator in 1990 and entered the ministry in 1995 and has continued in various capacities in all BJP cabinets thereafter.

The Rupani-Patel combination had taken charge in August 2016 after Anandiben Patel, Gujarat's first woman chief minister who had succeeded Narendra Modi in 2014, was put out to sea.

Though, for the record, she quit on attaining the age of 75, her departure came in the aftermath of the nationwide outcry over the lynching of four Dalits in Una for skinning a dead cow.