The safest Assembly seat for BJP in the saffron party’s traditional bastion — Rajkot West — is going for bypoll on Wednesday. The seat may have been vacated by former Gujarat Assembly Speaker Vajubhai Val, now the Governor of Karnataka, the significance of the Assembly seat is tremendous as the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, contested first-ever election of his life from here in the year 2002, then known as Rajkot-II seat.
Modi’s close aide and Saurashtra-Kutch region in-charge for the saffron brigade, Vijay Rupani is contesting against strong Kadva Patel leader and Congress candidate Jayantibhai Kalaria.
This is for the second time Vala vacated the seat. Earlier, he vacated for the Modi in February 2002, who took reign as Gujarat Chief Minister around four months ago replacing strong leuva Patel leader and BJP stalwart Keshbhai Patel. Vala worked for the then new Chief Minister and Modi won first election of his life with thumping majority by defeating Congress candidate Ashwin Mehta.
The seat has been a saffron citadel since 1967, seven years after Gujarat was carved out as a separate State in 1960 from a bilingual Mumbai State. Chimanbhai Shukla, a dedicated Jan Sangh worker and RSS stalwart had made Rajkot-II as his traditional constituency. later on, first Mayor of Rajkot Arvind Maniyar continued winning streak followed by Vajubhai, who won seven times from here and Modi for a brief period.
If BJP is heavily dependent on former Rajya Sabha MP Rupani to carry forward legacy, the oldest political party has played a caste card by putting Patel candidate and former septuagenarian Minister Kalaria. Rupani, who belongs to Jain-Bania community, says that caste card never worked in Rajkot West constituency. If it had Vala, who is from Karadia Rajput community would have never won from here as the votes of his community are as low as 1200. “Despite the fact Vajubhai used to won with comfortable margin. In the 2012 Assembly elections, he defeated Congress candidate by over 25,000 votes,” said Nitin Bhardwaj, BJP in-charge of Rajkot west seat.
The constituency has 2.90 lakh voters and Patels form nearly 55,000, there are around 15,000 Muslim voters, while the rest are from other diverse communities.Seventy one-year-old Kalaria’s father was staunch Congress leader and won Assembly elections from 1955 to 1962 from Rajkot district.