Ahmedabad | The BJP won all the 26 Lok Sabha seats at stake in Gujarat as the people in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood firmly behind him for the second time after 2014.
The BJP got a vote share of over 62 percent in Gujarat and the minimum margin of its victory was 1.27 lakh votes, reflecting the massive scale of saffron sweep. Like in 2014, the Congress failed to open its account this time around also.
The Rahul Gandhi-led party had put up a spirited fight in the 2017 assembly polls in Gujarat, but failed to carry forward the momentum in the 2019 general election.
While Modi did not contest election from the state this time, BJP chief Amit Shah, who also hails from Gujarat, won by a huge margin from Gandhinagar in his maiden Lok Sabha election foray.
In 2014, Modi had won from Vadodara, but vacated the seat later and retained Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, his second Lok Sabha constituency. The process of counting of votes continued till Friday morning and the last result came at around 10 am.
Declaration of results took time due to counting of VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail) slips, said a poll official. The VVPAT enables the verification of results displayed from the EVM during counting.
Shah won from Gandhinagar — a seat earlier held by BJP patriarch L K Advani — by 5.57 lakh votes, defeating Congress rival C J Chavda. Shah polled 8.94 lakh votes, while Chavda got 3.37 lakh ballots.
In 2014, the BJP had won all the 26 seats when Modi, the then Gujarat Chief Minister, was the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. This time when he was in contention for a second term as Prime Minister, the voters of the state firmly stood behind him.
The victory margin of the BJP’s Navsari candidate, C R Patil — 6.89 lakh — was the highest in all the 26 seats. Patil had won the 2014 Lok Sabha election from Navsari by a margin of 5.58 lakh votes.
In Vadodara, BJP candidate Ranjan Bhatt won by a margin of over 5.84 lakh votes against Congress’s Prashant Patel. Notably, she has crossed Modi’s victory margin of 5.70 lakh in the 2014 elections from Vadodara.
In Surat, BJP’s Darshana Jardosh won by 5.48 lakh votes, defeating Congress candidate Ashok Patel.
In Jamnagar, BJP’s Poonam Madam won by over 2.36 lakh votes, defeating Congress candidate Mulu Kandoriya.
BJP’s Mitesh Patel won from Anand, defeating Congress candidate and former Union minister Bharat Solanki by a margin of 1.97 lakh votes. In Bardoli, BJP’s Parbhu Vasava defeated Congress candidate Tushar Chaudhary by 2.15 lakh votes.
BJP candidate from Chhota Udepur, Gitaben Rathva, won by a margin of 3.77 lakh votes, defeating Congress candidate Ranjitsinh Rathva. BJP’s Mohan Kundariya won the Rajkot seat by a margin of 3.68 lakh votes, defeating Congress’s Lalit Kagathara.
BJP candidates won by over 3 lakh votes in Valsad, Panchmahal, Kheda, Kutch, Ahmedabad (East), Ahmedabad (West), Banaskantha, Bharuch and Bhavnagar. The lowest victory gap of a BJP candidate was in Dhahod, where its nominee Jaswantsinh Bhabhor, a minister in the Modi government, won by 1.27 lakh votes.
Expressing happiness over the BJP’s grand victory, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said the credit for this outcome goes to the people of the state. “Political pundits could not see the Modi wave until the exit polls. Today this wave is clear from the results.
“It is the victory of the people of the country. It reflects their faith in Narendra Modi and his honest and decisive leadership,” he said. The Congress accepted the defeat.
“This is the verdict of the people of the country and we accept it. We will try to find out our faults and rectify them,” state Congress president Amit Chavda said. In 2014 too, the Congress had lost all the 26 seats in Gujarat.
However, in the 2017 assembly polls, the party put up a tough fight, but the BJP managed to retain power with a slender majority. BJP workers started frenzied celebrations across the state.
Heeraba Modi, the nonagenarian mother of the prime minister, briefly joined the celebrations by greeting people who had gathered outside her house in Kudasan village on the outskirts of Gandhinagar.
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