Cong ends LS seat drought in Gujarat after ten years by winning Banaskantha
Thakor had earlier defeated BJP heavyweight Shankar Chaudhary in the 2017 Assembly elections and retained the seat in 2022 by defeating Swarupji Thakor of the BJP.
The Congress on Tuesday broke its decade-long curse in Gujarat as candidate Geniben Thakor won the Banaskantha Lok Sabha seat by over 30,000 votes.
The Congress had flopped in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state in both 2014 and 2019 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won all 26 seats. This time, the BJP is all set to win 25 seats.
Thakor defeated Rekha Chaudhari of the BJP by 30,406 votes in a nail-biting contest. Thakor polled 6,71,883 votes against her rival’s 6,41,477.
“I express my sincere gratitude to the Congress workers and voters of Banaskantha. The people of Banaskantha have given me a vote as well as a vote and I will fulfill all the promises made to them,” said Thakor, who had crowdfunded her campaign. “I thank them once again for coining the slogan ‘Banas ni ben Geniben’ (translated from Gujarati as ‘Geniben, the sister of Bansasnaktha’), and promise to serve them as long as I live… This is a victory of the people , the voters and democracy,” she told reporters.
Thakor, who is currently a Congress MLA from the Vav Assembly seat, said she received overwhelming response to her appeal for campaign donations.
Her rival Rekha Chaudhary, a professor at the technical university, was a candidate for the first time.
Thakor had earlier defeated BJP heavyweight Shankar Chaudhary in the 2017 Assembly elections and retained the seat in 2022 by defeating Swarupji Thakor of the BJP. She had lost her first Assembly election from Vav in 2012 to Shankar Chaudhary.
Thakor is known to have caused controversy with her statements. She had once praised a diktat issued by her community elders in 12 villages that banned inter-caste marriages and barred unmarried young women from carrying mobile phones. In 2018, after the rape of a 14-month-old baby, she had said rapists should be burned alive by a mob instead of being handed over to police. The BJP had won a Banaskantha Lok Sabha seat the last three times, including the 2013 by-election. The Congress had won the seat in 2004, and again in 2009 when Mukesh Gadhvi had defeated the BJP’s Haribhai Chaudhary.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: June 4, 2024 | 9:04 pm IST