NEW DELHI: The BJP has won almost half its seats in Gujarat from four cities. Rajkot, Ahmedabad, Surat and Vadodara have given the party 46 of the 99 seats it won in the 2017 Assembly elections.
Ahmedabad gives 21 MLAs to the assembly while Surat contributes 16. The BJP emerged victorious in 16 of the 21 seats in Ahmedabad and in 15 of the 16 seats in Surat. In the 2012 Assembly polls, the BJP had won 15 seats each from both cities.
Of the 10 seats up for grabs in Vadodara, the BJP won in nine. It bagged five of the eight seats in Rajkot. In the last elections too, the party’s performance was almost similar — nine seats in Vadodara and four in Rajkot.
The total number of seats the BJP won from the four cities in 2012 and 2017 is almost the same. In 2012, it won 45 seats from the four cities while this time it has got 46. This is an indication that the 16-seat slide it suffered from the 2012 polls came from the 127 seats in the rest of the state.
“The BJP has always been an urban-centric party and it has done better in richer urban seats whereas the Congress has fared better in poorer, urban seats. The rural-urban matrix is a very important part of the Gujarat election.
The BJP has won the election because it held on to its bastion of urban areas. The Congress, on the other hand, could not maximize its gains in rural areas like the BJP did in urban areas. The BJP has won eight out of 10 urban seats while the Congress managed only six out of 10 rural seats,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.
The four cities combined contribute 55 MLAs to the Assembly. This implies that the Congress has won 77 of the remaining 127 seats while the BJP has emerged victorious in only 50. The BJP had bettered its performance in urban areas as compared to the 2012 polls, where it had secured 59.5 per cent of the
votes. It secured a 73 per cent vote share in the urban regions of the state. “There has been extensive urbanisation in these areas over the past decade,” Jai Mrug, director of Voter Mood Research said.