Gujarat Election Results: Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Alpesh Thakor won from the Gandhinagar South constituency by a margin of 43,064 votes against Congress' Dr Himanshu Patel in the Gujarat Assembly elections 2022. Thakor garnered a total of 134,051 votes and bagged a vote share of 54.59 per cent.
Alpesh Thakor replaced sitting BJP MLA Shambhuji Thakor from the constituency. Gandhinagar South has been a stronghold of the saffron party since 1995.
In 2017, Alpesh Thakor had won the Radhanpur seat on a Congress ticket. He had defected to the BJP ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha election and later lost to Congress' Raghu Desai in the October 2019 byelection.
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It must be mentioned here that Alpesh Thakor is from the Thakor community, which is the largest group in the constituency. Thakor, along with Jignesh Mevani and Hardik Patel, was one of the main faces of the anti-BJP campaign in the 2017 polls.
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The Gandhinagar South seat was formed in 2008 from the Gandhinagar assembly constituency. It has had two legislative Gujarat Assembly elections to date, in 2012 and 2017. In both the elections, BJP won from this seat.
The BJP retained power in Gujarat for a record seventh straight term by getting a two-thirds majority in the Assembly election.
Riding on the charisma of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who addressed 31 election rallies in his home state, the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) steamrolled the opposition that included an aggressive Aam Aadmi Party(AAP) by winning 157 of the 182 seats in Gujarat with a vote share of nearly 53 per cent.
Previously, the BJP's best tally came in 2002, where it bagged 127 seats. The elections, conducted in the aftermath of the post-Godhra riots, saw Narendra Modi returning as the chief minister.
BJP also became the only party other than the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to have won seven straight Assembly elections. The CPI(M), which ruled West Bengal for 34 years from 1977 to 2011, had also won seven straight elections.