Stage set for voting in Phase 1 of high-stakes Gujarat poll battle

AHMEDABAD: Eighty-nine of Gujarat’s 182 seat assembly will go to the polls on Thursday, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hoping to consolidate its position in a region it faced some reverses five years ago, and safeguard its bastion from the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is looking to make gains in its maiden outing.

The second phase of the elections in 93 seats is scheduled for December 5, with results to be announced on December 8, along with those for Himachal Pradesh.

Gujarat chief election officer (CEO) P Bharti said 788 candidates were in the fray in the 89 seats across 19 districts of south Gujarat and parts of the Kutch and Saurashtra regions. Around 23.9 million of the total 43.5 million voters of the state will be eligible to exercise their franchise on Thursday.

In these 89 seats in 2017, the BJP won 48 with a voteshare of 49.3 %, and the Congress won 38 with 41.7% votes. This translated to a net pick-up of 16 seats by the Congress from 2012. Chhotubhai Vasava’s Bharatiya Tribal Party (BTP) won two and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) one.

But this time, the BJP is buoyed by the absence of anger among farmers and small traders, and no movement for quotas among Patidars, a key vote bank in the state. Moreover, a number of leaders who fuelled the Congress’s best show in a generation in 2017 are now with the BJP.

Morbi constituency is among the crucial seats in this phase. The area is in focus in the wake of the bridge collapse that claimed 135 lives on October 30. The BJP has replaced its sitting MLA Brijesh Merja and fielded former MLA Kanti Amrutiya, whose photographs of swimming in the Machchu river during the rescue operations went viral.