Mumbai: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the BJP shared honours in bypolls held to two assembly seats in Gujarat last week, with both parties retaining their seat in the results announced Monday. While Gopal Italia of the AAP won the crucial Visavadar assembly seat, Rajendrakumar Chavda of the BJP won the Kadi seat.
The bypoll to the Visavadar assembly seat in Junagadh district was necessitated by the resignation of AAP MLA Bhupendra Bhayani in December 2023. He joined the BJP in February 2024. The bypoll to Kadi (Scheduled Caste reserved) seat in Mehsana district was necessitated after the death of sitting BJP legislator Karsan Solanki in February this year.
Polling on both the seats was held on 19 June, with Visavadar recording a voter turnout of 56.8 percent and Kadi 57.9 percent. In the repolls ordered by the Election Commission in two polling stations of Malida and Nava Vaghaniya in the Visavadar constituency on Saturday, the voter turnout was 81.11 percent. The votes were counted Monday.
After 20 rounds of counting (of the total 21) in the Visavadar assembly constituency, one of the five seats in Gujarat the AAP won in the 2022 assembly polls, its leader Gopal Italia (35) was leading by more than 16,500 votes.
In the results announced after the counting of votes, Italia garnered 75,942 votes, defeating Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Kirit Patel by a margin of 17,554 votes. The Congress’ Nitin Ranpariya was a distant third, polling just 5,501 votes.
In Kadi, the other assembly seat in Gujarat which went to poll, the BJP’s Chavda
polled 99,742 votes, winning by a margin of 39,452. His nearest rival was the Congress’ Rameshbhai Chavda.
વિકાસ સાથે કડી
ભાજપ સાથે કડીકડી વિધાનસભા પેટા ચૂંટણીમાં ભારતીય જનતા પાર્ટીના ઉમેદવાર શ્રી રાજેન્દ્રભાઈ ચાવડાને ભવ્ય વિજય અપાવવા બદલ જનતા જનાર્દનનો ખૂબ ખૂબ આભાર તથા કાર્યકર્તાઓને હાર્દિક અભિનંદન pic.twitter.com/3nSfi9T145
— BJP Gujarat (@BJP4Gujarat) June 23, 2025
In Visavadar, the AAP and BJP candidates went neck and neck in early rounds of counting.
Winning the Visavadar bypoll was especially important for AAP. In the 2022 assembly election, the AAP clinched five seats in Gujarat, in their first victories in the 182-member assembly and registered a strong 12.5 percent vote share. The victory also helped the AAP get a national party status from the Election Commission.
While the BJP has phenomenally strengthened its hold on Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Visavadar assembly constituency has been elusive for the party for more than a decade.
In 2012, Keshubhai Patel, a former BJP legislator from the seat, won Visavadar on the symbol of his newly formed Gujarat Parivartan Party, which was merged with the BJP in 2014.
The Congress held the seat between 2014 and 2022, when AAP dislodged the Congress to clinch the seat.
Chitra Anand is an intern who graduated from Batch 2, ThePrint School of Journalism.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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