By IANS,
Gandhinagar: The Congress will hold power in this capital of Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Gujarat following its victory in the maiden polls to the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation (GMC).
The Congress bagged 18 of the 33 seats, edging out the BJP which won 16 seats.
While the Congress sought to interpret its victory as a major setback to Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP brushed it off as a very local phenomenon and an attempt by the political rivals to make a mountain of a molehill.
The civic elections in the Gujarat capital, the first since the city came up in 1960, were held on April 19 and counting took place Thursday. Hitherto an area coming under the jurisidictional control of a state government controlled notified authority, the city was declared to be a municipal corporation through an order of the Gujarat High Court in April 2010.
The results come as a shot in the arm for the Congress, which lost to the BJP in all the the six key municipal corporations – Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Surat, Jamnagar and Bhavnagar – of the state in October 2010.
A total of 116 candidates were in the fray for the 33 seats in the GMC and a voter turnout of 60 percent was recorded.