The landslide victory of the BJP, capturing 52.5% of the vote share in Gujarat, also meant that as many as 42 Congress candidates and 128 of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) forfeited their deposits. In 19 seats where the BJP won by huge margins, both the Congress and AAP lost their deposits. Such was the scale of the BJP victory that more than 1,200 of the 1,621 candidates in the race lost their deposits, though official figures from the Election Commission are awaited. Although the AAP got 12.92% of the votes, won 5 seats and was at number two in 35, it got less than a sixth of the total votes polled in over 70% of the 181 seats it contested. The Congress, which got 27.28% of the votes, and 17 seats, did not manage to reach one-sixth of the votes polled in 42 seats. A candidate loses the security deposit if the number of valid votes got by him or her is less than one-sixth or 16.67% of the total valid votes polled. Barring three, all the candidates put up by the AIMIM (13), BSP (101) and Samajwadi Party (17) lost their deposits. One of the seats where both the Congress and AAP candidates lost their deposits was Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel's Ghatlodia seat in Ahmedabad. He got 83% of the votes, while Congress candidate and Rajya Sabha MP Amee Yagnik got just 8.26% and the AAP's Vijay Patel 6.28% of the votes. Apart from Ghatlodia, the seats where both the Congress and AAP lost their deposits were Bardoli, Choriyasi, Ellisbridge, Halol, Jhagadia, Kalol, Majura, Maninagar, Manjalpur, Naranpura, Pardi, Rajkot South, Rajkot West, Sabarmati, Surat West, Udhna, Waghodia and Valsad. Of these Jhagadia, a tribal reserved seat, was considered the bastion of Bharatiya Tribal Party's (BTP) Chhotubhai Vasava. He had won the seat in 2017 while the BTP was an ally of the Congress, and this time contested as an Independent. The BJP though won Jhagadia this time, its candidate getting 33,000 more votes than Vasava, leaving the Congress with 7.71% of the votes, and AAP with 9.99%. In Kutiyana seat in Porbandar, won by Kandhal Jadeja by 46.94% of the votes (making him the sole SP winner of the Gujarat elections), the Congress got 6.83% and AAP 15.11% vote share. The BJP got 26.3% of the votes. Jadeja had joined the SP after the NCP, which had a seat-sharing agreement with the Congress, refused to give him a ticket from Kutiyana, which he won both in 2012 and 2017. Asked about the high number of seats in which Congress candidates lost their deposits, party spokesperson Manish Doshi said, "The figures related to loss of deposits have not yet come to me. But we are micro analysing the reasons in each seat at the polling booth level. We need to know the reasons behind the party's poor performance and we can start afresh once we know where we went wrong and what we did correct." AAP spokesperson Yogesh Jadvani said: "The BJP and Congress decided candidates completely on the basis of caste equations while our candidates were people with integrity and clean character, from ordinary families, with not much financial backing, and those loyal to the party.” Jadvani added that this was the reason the AAP announced its candidates six months before the election. “We knew that as a party, we would never have the wherewithal of the BJP or the Congress to run grand campaigns. Our campaign hardly cost Rs 8-10 lakh while the Congress and BJP spent over crores. The challenge for us was to find 182 candidates, which we got and we fought and won 5 seats.” Apart from these 5 seats, in 40, the AAP had more than 20% vote share. The lowest vote share of a Congress candidate was in Varachha Road seat, where the party got only 2.41% votes. Here, the fight was basically between the BJP's Kishore Kanani (55.13% votes) and the AAP's Alpesh Kathiria (41.32%). The lowest vote share by an AAP candidate was in Vav, where the party got only 0.7% of the votes. The seat was won by the Congress's Geniben Thakor, with 45.26% of the votes. The BJP got 38.37%. In percentage terms, the Congress lost deposit in 23% of the 179 seats it contested. Ally NCP fought in two seats, and lost its deposit in Naroda, where its candidate managed just a little over 5% vote share. The SP lost deposit in 16 of the 17 seats it contested while, of the 101 seats it put up candidates in, the BSP managed to retain deposit only in one, Jamnagar Rural (it got 17.91% of the votes here). Of the AIMIM's 13 candidates, only one, in Bhuj seat (17.36% votes), retained deposit. The highest number of candidates lost their deposits in Limbayat seat in Surat district (42 of 44). Limbayat had the highest number of contestants in the fray, most of them Independents. No candidate lost their deposit in the tribal reserved Gandevi and Mahuva seats in South Gujarat. Swept away Party Seats fought Lost deposits in AAP 181 128 Congress 179 42 BSP 101 100 SP 17 16 AIMIM 13 12 NCP 2 1
