Gujarat's only Congress bastion Vav to witness three-way contest

Ahmedabad, Nov 12 (PTI) The bypoll to the Vav assembly seat in Gujarat's Banaskantha district on Wednesday will be a three-way contest, with the Congress, BJP and a saffron party rebel in the fray as an independent.

Voting will begin at 7 am in 321 polling booths and culminate at 6 pm, the chief electoral candidate stated in a release.

Congress candidate and former MLA Gulabsinh Rajput will take on BJP's Swaroopji Thakor in the bypoll, but the presence of BJP rebel Mavji Patel will make it an interesting fight.

Seven other candidates, six of them independents and one from the Bharatiya Jan Parishad party, are also in the fray.

In the 2022 assembly polls, Swaroopji had lost from the Vav seat, a Congress stronghold, to opposition party candidate Geniben Thakor.

The Vav seat fell vacant following the resignation of Congress MLA Geniben Thakor, who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Banaskantha in June.

In the run-up to the bypoll, several key leaders from the Congress and BJP, including Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, Gujarat BJP chief and Union Minister CR Paatil and Gujarat Congress in-charge Mukul Wasnik, addressed rallies in Vav.

In the 2024 general elections, Geniben defeated the BJP's Rekhaben Chaudhary, a debutant, by more than 30,000 votes in Banaskantha, becoming the only Congress candidate to register a win in Gujarat.

The Vav seat has approximately 83,000 voters of the Thakor community, 50,000 belonging to the Chaudhary community, 43,000 Dalits, 25,000 Maldhari (OBC) and 18,000 Brahmin voters.

Mavji Patel, who belongs to the dominant Chaudhary community, won from the constituency in 1990 as the Janata Dal candidate. He then joined the opposition Congress but switched to the ruling BJP in 2019 after being denied a ticket from the Tharad seat in the 2017 state polls.

He was the Congress candidate from the Tharad seat in Banaskantha district in the 2012 polls but lost to the BJP. After being denied a ticket in 2017 from the seat, he fought as an independent but lost to BJP candidate Parbatbhai Patel.

In the bypoll held in Tharad in 2019, Congress's Gulabsinh Rajput defeated BJP nominee Jivraj Patel. He, however, lost to BJP candidate Shankar Chaudhary in 2022.

The constituency has been a Congress bastion, with Geniben winning the seat in 2017 and again in 2022.

As per a release issued by the chief electoral officer, the constituency has 3.10 lakh registered voters, including 1.61 lakh men and 1.49 lakh women, it stated. PTI PJT PD ARU