By IANS,
Gandhinagar: The elections Sunday to six municipal corporations in the state were lacklustre with a turnout of around 45 percent. Both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress have claimed they would win the polls.
The polls for the municipal corporations of Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Surat, Jamnagar and Bhavnagar were by and large peaceful barring a few minor incidents.
Veteran BJP leader and Lok Sabha MP from the state, L.K. Advani, and Chief Minister Narendra Modi exercised their franchise for the Ahmedabad municipal corporation. Modi casted his ballot at 10.10 a.m. making it a “perfect ten” on “10.10.10” (Oct 10, 2010).
Expressing concern over the lukewarm response of the voters, Advani said that compulsory voting might be an solution to the problem. The compulsory voting bill, passed by the state assembly for elections to state local bodies and later rejected by the governor, was readopted during the monsoon session last month.
The chief minister was confident that the BJP would emerge victorious in all the six municipal corporations.
State Congress president Siddhartha Patel, on the other hand, also claimed that the results would come in favour of his party.
Currently the BJP is in control of these six corporations, while the seventh in Junagadh is ruled by the Congress.