By Rajeev Khanna, IANS
Ahmedabad : The stage is set for declaring the winners of the high-profile Gujarat assembly elections. Preparations have been made for counting of votes Sunday at 37 centres amidst tight security arrangements.
The Election Commission has made provisions for displaying the results, as they are declared, on its website eci.gov.in. Polling was held in two phases in the state Dec 11 and Dec 16, with the ballots cast through electronic voting machines (EVMs).
In the first phase, the districts of Saurashtra, Kutch and South Gujarat had gone to the polls to decide winners in 87 assembly constituencies. There were 668 candidates in the fray in this phase. The phase saw 60 percent of 17.8 million eligible voters turning out to cast their votes.
In the second phase, 63 percent of 11.5 million eligible voters turned up for casting their votes Dec 16. Polling was held to decide the fate of 599 candidates who were in the fray for the 95 seats of central and northern Gujarat regions.
The state witnessed a fight between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that has been in power for more than a decade and the opposition Congress party that is confident of making it to the winning position this time after having received a drubbing in 2002 when the BJP, led by its Chief Minister Narendra Modi, had swept back to power in the charged atmosphere that had followed the Godhra train burning incident and subsequent communal riots.
This time also the polling followed a high-pitched campaign from both parties. For the BJP, it was Modi who was the main campaigner and in fact managed the entire campaign all by himself. He was the sole crowd-puller for his party that contested the polls around the personality of Modi and his functioning over the last five years. The national leadership of the BJP did not get much public response at election rallies.
The party’s problems had been compounded by the large-scale dissidence against Modi that was led by his predecessor Keshubhai Patel. In fact some of the suspended dissident leaders from the BJP contested on the Congress ticket. The dissident factor could turn out to be a dampener for BJP prospects in Saurashtra and parts of south Gujarat.
In the absence of a state-level leader who could match Modi, the Congress campaign was led by party President Sonia Gandhi along with other leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The party is looking forward to making major gains on account of the dissidence in the BJP.
During the campaign, local issues took a back seat once Modi’s development plank failed to evoke the public response that the BJP had expected. After that, it was the issues of security and terrorism that became the central theme of the poll campaign for both parties.
The Election Commission had to step in to keep the poll campaign in check with both the sides spewing venom. While Modi was given a notice for reportedly justifying the fake police encounter of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Digvijay Singh were asked to explain their comments wherein they had used the words ‘merchants of death’ for the Gujarat government and referred to the ‘prevalence of Hindu terrorism’ respectively.
Both the parties are high on confidence on the eve of counting.
State Congress president Bharatsinh Solanki told IANS, “We are sure to form the government. Common people along with traditional Congress voters turned out in large numbers to vote for us.”
On the other hand Shashiranjan Yadav of the IT cell of the BJP said, “There was a strong undercurrent that was marked by a high turnout. This was an undercurrent in support of the work done by Narendrabhai over the last five years.”
Purushottam Rupala, president of Gujarat BJP, said: “We are 100 percent confident of victory in the polls.”