Ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s list of 70 candidates released on Friday afternoon put an end to speculation over whether Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel would change their constituencies or not as both the top leaders of Gujarat BJP will contest the 2017 Assembly polls from their respective constituencies — Rajkot West and Mehsana.
Of the 70 candidates in the list, 49 sitting MlAs have been repeated. 16 new faces appear in the saffron party’s first list including that of Baranda. Young MlA Ketan Inamdar, who won as independent candidate from Savali constituency in 2012, will now contest 2017 Assembly polls on BJP ticket. Four women candidates too have been part of the list.
Contradictory to anticipation that the first list would have names of only those candidates who are set to contest from 89 seats across 19 districts of Saurashtra-Kutch and South Gujarat regions where first phase of polling will be conducted on December 9, but the list contains names of those constituencies where voting would be done on the second phase on December 14. In the second phase, polling will be done for 93 constituencies across 14 districts of North Gujarat and Central Gujarat regions.
Of the 89 seats which would go for polling in the first phase, 58 names of candidates announced and out of 93 constituencies for second phase 12 names declared in the list. Apart from Rupani and Patel, other heavyweight who found their names in the list are Gujarat BJP president Jitu Vaghani (Bhavnagar West), Gujarat Ministers Bhupendrasinh Chudasama (Dholka), Jayesh Radadia (Jetpur) and Shanker Chaudhary (Vav).
Raghavji Patel, Dharmendrasinh Jadeja, Ramsinh Parmar, CK Raulji and Mansinh Chauhan who won on Congress tickets in 2012 Assembly polls and resigned from the opposition party ahead of the keenly contested Rajysabha elections found their names in the ruling party’s list this time.
The think tank of saffron brigade has also kept caste equations in mind while allotting ticket as 16 candidates are belong to Patidar or Patel community, 11 from tribal community or ST, 26 OBC that include 15 from Koli community alone, three Brahmin, eight Kshtriya and rest are from other communities looking to the prominence of particular caste in respective constituencies.
PC Baranda who resigned as Superintendent of Police of tribal dominated Chhota Udepur district just couple of days back, has been give ticket to contest from Bhiloda constituency in North Gujarat. The constituency is reserved for member of Schedule Tribe.
Chairman of the Gujarat State Cooperative Marketing Federation ltd, popularly known as GUJCOMASOl and former Gujarat Minister in Narendra Modi Government Dilip Sanghani has been given ticket from lathi seat. Snaghani had lost the Amreli seat to his Congress challenger Paresh Dhanani in 2012 election.
Notification for the nomination process of the first phase of the Assembly elections was issued on November 14. The last date for the filing nomination will be 21 November. On November 22, the process of scrutiny would be carried out. The nomination can be withdrawn till November 24. In the case of second phase, notification will be issued on November 20. The last date for nominations will be November 27. The date for scrutiny of nomination papers will be November 28 and last date for the withdrawal of nomination would be on November 30.