Skip to main content

Key Constituencies in second phase of Gujarat elections: Godhra faces unemployment

Key Constituencies in second phase of Gujarat elections:  Godhra

Godhra faces unemployment

By Deepak Parvatiyar*



Last time when CK Raulji contested from Godhra, he had won on a Congress ticket by a thin margin of 2868 votes against his nearest BJP rival Pravinshin Chauhan. Raulji, a five-term Godhra MLA, is contesting this time on a BJP ticket against Congress’s Rajendrasinh Patel. Last time when Rajendrasinh had contested the Godhra seat – as a Congress candidate in 2002, he had lost to BJP’s Haresh Bhatt. Thereafter since 2007, Raulji had won the seat for the Congress. Muslims, who make up between one-fifth and one-fourth of Godhra’s electorate of 2.5 lakh, had consistently voted for him and it is to be seen whether they still support him after his move to join the BJP. However earlier too he was in the BJP and won the seat twice as a BJP candidate in the 1990s. Before that he had even won the seat as a Janata Dal candidate in 1990.

The BJP last won Godhra in 2002 and is pinning its hopes in the induction of Raulji.

It may be mentioned that Godhra had caught the national attention after unknown miscreants set the Sabarmati Express on fire on the morning of 27 February, 2002, in which 59 people including Kar Sevaks who were travelling from Ayodhya had died. This had triggered widespread communal riots in Gujarat. Over 15 years of the incident, the Muslims of this town now term the incident as distant memory and want to move ahead. The major issue here is of unemployment. Many were left unemployed here when General Moptors shut down its plant in Halol which is about an hour’s distance from Godhra. The residents also rue at the closure of several small scale units in the constituency “because of the GST”.

Godhra is a place where SardarVallabhbhai Patel had met Mahatma Gandhi for the very first time in 1917.  
*The writer is a senior journalist

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maharashtra Assembly Polls 2014 : Implications of the End of Alliances

Maharashtra Assembly Polls 2014 : Implications of the End of Alliances By  Deepak Parvatiyar September 27, 2014 The time-tested political alliances — Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Indian National Congress-Nationalist Congress Party — collapsed like a pack of cards within a matter of hours in Maharashtra on Thursday, the 26th September. On the surface, the reasons seem common for both the break ups – each one of the alliance partners wanted to have a larger share of the pie and wanted to contest more seats than the other in the ensuing state assembly elections. Performances of Allies in 2009 Maharashtra Assembly Polls In the last assembly elections in 2009, the Congress had emerged as the largest party in the 272-member Maharashtra House by winning 82 of the 169 seats that it had contested. Its coalition partner, the NCP, had then won 62 of the 114 seats it had contested then then. You may also like to read Who will be the next Chief Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Indian Elections: Hostage to Corrupt Politicians?

Indian Elections: Hostage to Corrupt Politicians By  Deepak Parvatiyar September 18, 2014 We often talk of corruption pervading the electoral system in our country. We rue the criminals entering politics as we point out that 13 cabinet ministers in the present Union government face various charges of corruption. Further, as many as 186 MPs got elected despite facing criminal charges. In desperation, we expect a messiah a la Anna Hazare to stem the rot. Yet, corrupt and criminal elements manage to win elections, because we, the voters, elect them, even though we are fed up with corruption and criminalisation of politics. Do People Patronise Corrupt Politicians? Given a choice, don’t we voters most of the time opt for a benevolent crook who we perceive as a smart go-getter? Don’t we loathe an idealist simply because (s)he tends to go “too much by the book”?   Ask the Reserve Bank of India Governor, Raghuram Rajan! While  delivering a speech at...
Post a Comment
Read more

WANTED: A Leader

WANTED: A Leader EDITORIAL NEWS Share on facebook Share on blogger Share on linkedin Share on twitter More Sharing Services 31 WANTED: A Leader June 13, 2012 12:15 PM By Deepak Parvatiyar Do we really have any leader in our country who is above religion, caste, and sectarian politics and yet popular with the masses? Can you name any one name that is acceptable to the majority as a mass leader? My question assumes significance in the wake of what we witnessed last week. First, at the Congress Working Committee meeting the delegates raked up the issue of inaccessible ministers (how can they be leaders if they are inaccessible?) Yet, the most important issue was the lack of unanimity even within the ruling coalition itself over the choice of the next Presidential candidate. Thereafter, the BJP’s Gujarat satrap Narendra Modi delivered a power packed punch to claim the scalp of his little-known-much-discussed and elusive bête noire Sanjay Joshi. (Can Modi ...
Post a Comment
Read more