Change of candidate pays off, BJP wins Bharuch by a big margin

The party won the seat with an impressive margin of 64,000 votes.Ramesh Mistry, who was picked in place of sitting MLA Dushyantbhai Patel to contest from this BJP stronghold, polled 108,181 votes, compared to 44,087 votes polled by his nearest rival from the Congress party, Jaikantbhai Patel.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s strategy to drop half of its sitting MLAs to fight anti-incumbency appeared to have paid off in Bharuch. The party won the seat with an impressive margin of 64,000 votes.

Ramesh Mistry, who was picked in place of sitting MLA Dushyantbhai Patel to contest from this BJP stronghold, polled 108,181 votes, compared to 44,087 votes polled by his nearest rival from the Congress party, Jaikantbhai Patel. In the battle of ballots, Manharbhai Parmar of Aam Aadmi Party came third with 14,309 votes.

Over 2.93 lakh electors were eligible to cast their vote in the assembly constituency which went to polls in the first phase of the Gujarat elections on December 1.

The BJP has never lost an election in Bharuch since 1995.

The Congress was banking on anti-incumbency to wrest the seat from the BJP this time but the entry of the AAP in the poll arena upset the electoral calculations.

With an aggressive campaign in the run up to the assembly polls, the AAP wooed the voters belonging to the middle and lower classes through party chief Arvind Kejriwal’s 10-point “guarantee” which included free electricity, free healthcare services and medicines as well as jobs to every youth and Rs 3,000 monthly allowance to those unemployed.

With Muslims forming the second largest chunk of electors in the Bharuch assembly segment after those belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), AAP also made efforts to get a share in the Congress’ minority votes.

The Bharuch district being one of the most industrialised regions in Gujarat, the assembly seat also has a large number of migrant and urban voters.

Unemployment, price rise, higher education and primary facilities like roads, gutters, and water were the key issues for the election in the assembly segment.