Continuously depleting Gujarat Congress is finally putting serious efforts to bring some optimism among its workers through the ensuing bypolls in the State scheduled for September 13.
The senior leaders of Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) seem to have done research ahead of by-election of nine Assembly constituencies and Vadodara lok Sabha seat as the party think tank has assigned the responsibility to senior leaders keeping caste equations and their influence in respective constituency in mind.
The decision to assign responsibility was taken at a time after one more debacle of the oldest party in Gujarat. The Congress party lost one more municipality in the State as 12 Congress councilors decided to join the BJP in North Gujarat town Radhanpur. As a result of it, BJP became majority party in 27 member municipality with strength of 18 members. This development is likely to impact poll bound Deesa Assembly segment.
The leader of Opposition and strong Kshatriya leader Shankarsinh Vaghela has been assigned Kshatriya dominated Matar constituency. The Congress has also fielded a Kshatriya candidate Kalidas Parmar from the constituency where out of nearly 1.97 lakh electorate, 52,000 are from the community. The Congress is also banking upon 27,000 Muslim and around 42,000 Dalit votes.
Another Kshatriya leader and former Union Minister Bharatsinh Solanki has been assigned responsibility of Anand Assembly seat. Out of about 2.18 lakh voters, Kshatriya are almost 50,000 against nearly 36,000 Patel voters. Just like Matar, the party is expecting one sided voting in its favour from nearly 28,000 Muslim and 25,000 Dalit voters. Solanki is also son of former Gujarat Chief Minister Madhavsinh Solanki, whose influence in Anand as well as Matar, which is part of Charotar area of Gujarat, is well known. The reserve seat for ST —limkheda – is a tribal dominated area in Dahod district. The Congress has given responsibility to another former Chief Minister Amarsinh Chaudhary’s son Tushar Chaudhary, who was Minister of State in Manmohan Singh’s Government.
Same is the case with Deesa Assembly constituency that has considerable Thakore and Maldhari voters, while the party has fielded Govabhai Desai as the candidate, who hails from Maldhari community.