Gujarat Election results 2022: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate and Other Backward Castes (OBC) leader Alpesh Thakor has won the Gandhinagar South seat, as results from the Gujarat assembly elections continued to roll in on Thursday, 8 December. Thakor garnered a total of 134,051 votes, beating Congress’ Himanshu V Patel and AAP's Daulat Patel with a winning margin of 43,064 votes.
Why is it significant?- Alpesh Thakor replaced sitting BJP MLA Shambhuji Thakor from the constituency. Gandhinagar South has been a stronghold of the saffron party since 1995.
What did the 2017 results look like?: In the last assembly elections, BJP's Shambhuji Thakor had retained the seat. Thakor had also won Gandhinagar in 2007, before the seat was bifurcated after delimitation in 2009.
Why is the seat important?- The Gandhinagar North seat is mostly urban. The adjoining villages, including some in the Ahmedabad district, come under the Gandhinagar South seat.
Gujarat Assembly Election 2022: Full Coverage
Has Alpesh Thakor won before?- Meanwhile, in 2017, Alpesh Thakor had won the Radhanpur seat on a Congress ticket. He had defected to the BJP ahead of the 2019 national polls and later lost to Congress’s Raghu Desai in the October 2019 by-election.
In 2017, this constituency was won by BJP. Gandhinagar South Assembly constituency falls under the Ahmedabad East Lok sabha constituency.
Alpesh Thakor was formerly associated with the Congress party but this time he was fielded from Gandhinagar South. Alpesh contested his last election from Radhanpur. Thakor, who was one of the faces of the anti-BJP uproar in the state during the 2017 elections, joined the BJP in 2019. He was elected on a Congress ticket in 2017 but lost his Radhanpur seat in a by-election in 2019.
2017 results:
BJP MLA Shambhuji Chelaji Thakor won for the third time from Gandhinagar South. Thakor defeated Congress’s Govind Hiraji Solanki by 11,538 votes. In 2012 state polls, he defeated Congress’s Sureshkumar Chaturdas Patel by 4,225 votes.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Patel Hasmukhbhai Somabhai won from Ahmedabad East Lok Sabha (MP) Seat with the margin of around 4,34,330 votes by defeating Gitaben Patel of Congress.
