With backing of heavyweights like Congress MP Geniben Thakor and Gujarat Assembly Speaker Shankar Chaudhary for their respective candidates along with former MLA and a local strongman, Mavjibhai Patel, contesting as an Independent, a total of 10 candidates are in the fray for the Vav Assembly Constituency by-election on November 13.
The Vav seat of Banaskantha was vacated by Geniben after her win in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, making her the only Congress candidate from the state to emerge victorious. She had won against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Rekha Chaudhary by over 30,000 votes.
Even though the bypoll is being viewed as a tough contest predominantly between Congress’s candidate Gulabsinh Rajput, an upper caste, and BJP’s Swarupji Thakor, an OBC, insiders said that the ruling party is concerned about Mavjibhai, an Anjana Patel, eating into the BJP’s vote share among the Chaudhary community.
Mavji, who has a considerable influence over the Chaudhary community to which he belongs, was elected to Janata Dal from Vav-Tharad seat in 1990.
While there are already talks about Shankar Chaudhary’s likely absence from October 4 to 8, Geniben is slated to launch her campaign for Gulabsinh Rajput starting Thursday.
The Speaker, accompanied by Congress’s Danilimda MLA Shailesh Parmar and BJP’s Mandvi MLA Aniruddh Dave as observers, will represent Gujarat in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association meeting to be held at Sydney, Australia, from November 3 to 8.
On November 2, Chaudhary will attend a New Year ‘Sneh Milan’ in his constituency Tharad in Banaskantha.
One candidate — Chetankumar Oza — is contesting from Bharatiya Jan Parishad, which is also abbreviated as BJP.
The verification of the candidatures was carried out on October 28 while the deadline for withdrawal of nomination papers ended Wednesday.
As on October 15, a total of 3,10,681 voters are set to vote at a total 321 polling stations in Vav assembly constituency.
BJP candidate Thakor is a veteran from Banaskantha who fought against Congress’s Geniben in the 2022 Assembly elections from the Vav constituency. Thakor, however, lost to Geniben by a margin of 15,601 votes.
Rajput is a Kshatriya, and he will be contesting a seat seen as dominated by the Thakors, both being OBC candidates — a category that comprises more than 18% of the constituency’s votes. Rajput had won the assembly election to the Tharad constituency in 2019, serving one term.
The by-election will be crucial for the Congress which lost its position as leader of Opposition in the 2022 Gujarat Assembly elections, winning only 17 of 182 seats it contested along with ally Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in its worst performance in the state.
