Gujarat High Court restores nomination of BJP’s Mayuri Patel in Anand Panchayat poll

The returning officer, Anand district development officer (DDO), held that caste certificates issued outside Gujarat were not valid for reserved-category posts in local self-government elections under the Gujarat Taluka and District Panchayat Election of President and Vice President Rules, 1994, and rejected Patel’s nomination form.

As the Bharatiya Janata Party had no other woman from the ST category to fill the post, the rejection temporarily shifted the advantage to the Congress candidate, Gauri Shambhu Tadvi, elected from the ST-reserved Hadgud seat.

With Tadvi’s nomination the only valid one remaining in the race, Congress leaders anticipated an unopposed victory to the president’s post after the BJP won a 33-seat majority against Congress’s seven in the 40-member district panchayat on April 28.

Even as Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee president Amit Chavda quickly consolidated the advantage and publicly claimed that Patel did not meet the ST reservation criteria and the party had raised objection before the Election Commission, the district collector, and the tribal commissioner, the BJP, equally swiftly, took the matter to the Gujarat High Court for an urgent hearing.

Court’s ruling

The petition was urgently heard Sunday, with Justice R T Vachhani noting that Patel is a “duly elected Member of the Anand District Panchayat and belongs to the Bhil Scheduled Tribe, which is a tribe specifically notified as a Scheduled Tribe in relation to both the State of Gujarat and the State of Maharashtra…”

Arguing for Patel, Advocate C B Upadhyaya submitted that the rejection was “legally untenable” and that the Bhil tribe was “specifically notified” in both states. Government Pleader G H Virk urged the court to “determine judiciously” the matter and pass an appropriate order.

The court issued notice to all respondents, returnable on June 8, and granted the critical interim relief sought by Patel, effectively reinstating her nomination and restoring her right to contest for the post.

“The order was received on Monday and handed over to the election officers, following which, the BJP rightfully secured the post of the president in the elections. We had the complete majority… therefore, we decided to move the petition before the high court on Sunday itself,” BJP Anand District President Sanjay Patel told The Indian Express.

For the BJP, Anand, a Congress bastion that recently fell, is not just another district panchayat battle. The district is located in Gujarat’s politically influential Charotar region, where the global diaspora, cooperative institutions, Patidar influence and deeply entrenched rural milk unions historically decide electoral outcomes.

Anand also carries symbolic weight for the BJP because of its recent takeover of the Amul cooperative, the final sign of the Congress’s fall in its bastion.

The contest became politically sensitive after the BJP’s strong showing in recent local body elections across the district, including its emphatic win in the newly formed Karamsad-Anand Municipal Corporation.

In that backdrop, even the possibility of Congress capturing the district panchayat president’s post despite the BJP’s overwhelming numerical majority threatened to create an embarrassing political narrative for the ruling party, ahead of the 2027 Assembly polls.