Gujarat: In high-stakes byelctions, five Assembly seats record drop in turnout

However, with the Lok Sabha elections held simultaneously on Tuesday, turnout figures for the 2024 bypolls for the five seats are higher than the parliamentary seats which these Assembly segments are part of.

Porbandar Lok Sabha seat — comprising Porbandar and Manavadar apart from five other assembly segments —— recorded a voter turnout of 51.79 per cent. Vadodara, of which Vaghodia assembly seat is a part of, recorded a turnout of 61.33 percent. Anand, which comprises Khambhat, recorded 63.96 per cent turnout; and Mehsana – that has Vijapur segment – saw a turnout of 59.04 per cent.

Manavadar

Among these five Assembly seats, Manavadar witnessed a bypoll during the 2019 Lok Sabha election due to sitting Congress MLA Jawahar Chavda defecting to the BJP and becoming a minister in then Vijay Rupani government. The turnout in the bypoll was 63.45 per cent. That was marginally lower than 65.90 per cent recorded in 2017. Then a Congress candidate, Chavda had won the 2017 election by 29,763 votes, securing a total 88,570 votes and vote share of 57.39. His BJP rival Nitin Faldu secured 38.11 per cent of vote share. However, Chavda’s victory margin and the vote share as a BJP nominee fell to 9,768 votes and 51.55 per cent respectively in the 2019 bypoll when Arvind Ladani was his challenger from Congress. Eventually, he lost the 2022 election to Arvind Ladani of Congress by 3,453 votes.

In a deja vu moment for the constituency, the 2024 bypoll was warranted due to Ladani resigning as an MLA and defecting to the BJP. His Congress rival this time is Hari Kansagra.

Porbandar

In Porbandar, Arjun Modhwadia of Congress lost to Babu Bokhiria of the BJP in the 2017 state election by a slender margin of 1,855 votes. However, Modhwadia turned the tables in 2022 by defeating Bokhiria by 8,181 votes. The AAP’s Jivan Jungi got just 3.20 per cent of the votes. Ahead of the polls this year, however, Modhwadia ended his over 40-year-long association with Congress and defected to BJP in March  after resigning as MLA, warranting the bypoll. His rival in this bypoll is Raju Odedra.

Vaghodia

With a total of 2.34 lakh registered voters, the constituency saw a voter turnout of 70.2 per cent in the bypolls this year as against 74.06 per cent  in the December 2022  elections with 1.5 lakh registered voters. In the 2022 state elections, Dharmendrasinh Vaghela won the seat as an Independent, defeating six-term sitting MLA Madhu Shrivastav who was also contesting as a BJP rebel after being denied a ticket in 2022.

The bypoll was warranted in Vaghodia after Vaghela — who had been expelled from the BJP in 2017– resigned from the Assembly on January 25 to rejoin the BJP. Popularly known as Bapu, he contested first from the constituency as a rebel BJP candidate in 2017 but remained unsuccessful.

The BJP has held the constituency since 1998, after Shrivastav– who won as an independent in 1995– joined the BJP. The seat was won by Congress for three terms from 1975 to 1985.

In the bypolls held Tuesday, Vaghela is facing a challenge from Congress’s Kanu Gohil. Both belong to the Kshatriya community, which has vowed to vote against the BJP in Gujarat in the backdrop of the protests against Union Minister Parshottam Rupala over his contentious comments.  Shrivastav, who had filed his nominations as an independent, withdrew in support of Kanu Gohil.

In 2017, with 2.22 lakh registered voters, the turnout was recorded at 76.92 per cent when the BJP’s Madhu Shrivastav was elected for a sixth consecutive term with a victory margin of 10,271 in a close contest with Vaghela, who had the contested as an Independent after rebelling from the BJP.

Khambhat

The constituency recorded a turnout of 66.28 per cent with 2.3 lakh registered voters. In 2022, with 2.33 lakh registered voters, Khambhat had seen a voter turnout of 67.95 per cent and a victory for Chirag Patel as the Congress candidate, with the party managing to wrest the seat from the BJP for the first time since 1990.

Chirag had polled 43.53 per cent of votes in a close contest with sitting BJP MLA Mahesh Raval, who polled 41.19 per cent of votes while NOTA (None of the Above) option recorded 2,590 votes (1.63 per cent). The AAP had no impact in the seat with its candidate Arunkumar Gohil securing just 1.58 per cent votes.

Chirag Patel won by a margin of 3,711 seats, defeating Raval, who had been linked to a sextortion case during his term.

After the 2022 state polls, Chirag Patel from Khambhat was the first Congress MLA to quit before the party faced several exits.

Khambhat seat fell vacant on December 19, 2023, when Chirag quit the party, slamming the Congress working style and its stand on the Ram Mandir issue. He was earlier a BJP leader until he switched over to the Congress for a ticket in the 2022 polls.

The BJP has been winning the constituency —  renamed from Cambay in the 2007 state elections — since 1990.

Chirag Patel is pitted against Congress’s local leader Mahendrasinh Parmar, the former  Anand district Congress president and former general secretary of the district unit of the party.

Vijapur

In Vijapur, Congress’s CJ Chavda had defeated sitting BJP MLA Raman Patel in 2022 by 7,053 votes. His Chavda’s vote share was 49.52 per cent while Patel’s vote share fell from 47.80 in 2017 to 45.08. AAP candidate had got 3.16 percent vote share. The 2024 bypoll has been warranted due to Chavda crossing over to the BJP.