Geniben, the giant slayer of Gujarat, who ‘crowd-funded’ her campaign

Even as the counting was underway, Thakor said it was a victory for the people of Banaskantha. “Satyamev Jayate,” she said in her first reaction after gaining a comfortable lead.

Thakor was among the candidates whose campaign was crowd-funded after the Congress alleged it had “run out of funds”, and could not support its nominees.

In March, Gujarat Congress president Shaktisinh Gohil had told mediapersons that the party does not have money for poll campaigning because the Union government seized Rs 115.321 crore by freezing 11 bank accounts in a seven-year-old Income Tax case.

Speaking to mediapersons on Tuesday, Gohil said, “In Gujarat, BJP said Congress will not get a candidate, then it said BJP will win every seat with a margin of over 5 lakh votes. Barring one or two seats, BJP has not won with a high margin… I thank Gujarat’s voters for making Geniben, our ben, desh ki ben”.

In the Vav Assembly constituency, Thakor, an OBC, had earned the reputation of a giant slayer when she defeated BJP candidate and chairman of Banas Dairy, Shankar Chaudhary, by a margin of over 6,600 votes in the 2017 state polls.

In the 2022 state polls, Chaudhary contested from Tharad in Banaskantha district, and Thakor again won from Vav against BJP’s Swarupji Thakor in an election where the Congress recorded its worst performance, winning only 17 seats.

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Thakor had claimed that there was a lot of pressure to get her nomination cancelled. “They tried to pressurise the collector, through a lawyer, to get my form rejected but I thank the election officer that he did not allow that to happen”, she had told The Indian Express.

Gohil, corroborating the claim, said on Tuesday, “On 18 seats, including Banaskantha, objections were raised during filing of nomination and attempts made to get the forms cancelled. But I thank our team that scrutinised forms minutely. When that did not work, attempts were made to get the nominations withdrawn.”

Banaskantha was among the 14 seats where the BJP did not field its sitting MPs. Chaudhari replaced sitting MP Parbatbhai Patel, who had won in 2019.

Thakor is known to be vocal about issues related to women’s welfare, even if it meant supporting the ruling BJP, as she did during the Budget Session in the Assembly last year.

Supporting BJP’s Kalol MLA Fatehsinh Chauhan, she had requested Speaker Shankar Chaudhary to amend the Gujarat Registration of Marriages Act, 2006, to make parents’ signature mandatory during registration of marriages and mention the girls’ birthplace at birth certificates.

In 2019, Thakor had supported the move by her community to restrict teenaged girls from using mobile phones. This came after several incidents of love marriages were reported in the Thakor community. In July 2019, 12 villages at Dantiwada taluka in Banskantha passed a nine-point resolution banning inter-caste marriages and teenaged girls from keeping mobilephones.