AHMEDABAD : With an eye on the Gujarat Assembly polls, Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener Arvind Kejriwal will hold a mega road show-cum-’tiranga yatra’ on June 6 in the Patidar-dominated Mehsana area. The event will target the Patidar, Chaudhary, Thakor, and OBC communities.
This will be Kejriwal’s first visit to Mehsana, which remains a BJP stronghold. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the BJP won five out of the seven Assembly seats here, while the Congress won two. Later, Unjha MLA Asha Patel, one of the two Congress MLAs, joined the BJP. She died last year.
Talking about the arrival of Delhi CM, AAP Gujarat president Gopal Italia said, “The parivartan yatra, which began on May 15, will end on June 5, and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is visiting Gujarat to spread the concept of ‘parivartan’. On June 6, he will reach Ahmedabad airport and travel to Mehsana, where he will hold a grand tiranga yatra, which will begin from the city municipal shopping centre. He will address people during the roadshow.”
Ahead of the polls, AAP is trying to project itself as an alternative to the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress in Gujarat. This is the second ‘tiranga yatra’ in Gujarat in which Kejriwal will participate. Earlier, he and Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann held their maiden roadshow in Ahmedabad on April 2.
Mehsana, also known as the ‘political laboratory of Gujarat’, is where Hardik Patel started the Patidar movement in 2015. The Patidar agitators had then set fire to the office of Mehsana BJP leader and current Gujarat Health Minister Hrishikesh Patel. The movement had spread like wildfire across the state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home town Vadnagar also falls in the Mehsana district. In 1984, when the entire nation stood with Congress after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the BJP won two seats in the country. Of these, one was Mehsana, where Dr. AK Patel stood winner.