Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate and Other Backward Castes (OBC) leader Alpesh Thakor has won the Gandhinagar South seat, as results from the Gujarat assembly elections continued to roll in on Thursday, 8 December.
Thakor garnered a total of 134,051 votes, beating Congress’ Himanshu Patel and AAP's Daulat Patel with a winning margin of 43,064 votes.
Why is it significant?: Alpesh Thakor replaced sitting BJP MLA Shambhuji Thakor from the constituency. Gandhinagar South has been a stronghold of the saffron party since 1995.
What did the 2017 results look like?: In the last assembly elections, BJP's Shambhuji Thakor had retained the seat. Thakor had also won Gandhinagar in 2007, before the seat was bifurcated after delimitation in 2009.
Why is the seat important?: The Gandhinagar North seat is mostly urban. The adjoining villages, including some in the Ahmedabad district, come under the Gandhinagar South seat.
Has Alpesh Thakor won before?: Meanwhile, in 2017, Alpesh Thakor had won the Radhanpur seat on a Congress ticket. He had defected to the BJP ahead of the 2019 national polls and later lost to Congress’s Raghu Desai in the October 2019 by-election.
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