Gandhinagar:

The eyes of whole country will be on Gujarat tomorrow where the much awaited counting of votes for the recently held assembly election would take place at 37 counting centers across the state amid tight security.

Overall 68.41% average voting ( as compared to 71.34% of last election in 2012) had taken place for the election which was a ‘do-or-die’ affair for both ruling BJP and main opposition Congress and a battle of prestige for PM Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah as well as Congress President Rahul Gandhi. 89 seats of 19 districts of South Gujarat and Saurashtra region had gone to polls in the first phase on December 9 while remaining 93 seats of 14 districts of North and Central Gujarat underwent polling in the second and final phase on December 14. Six booths in first phase had gone for re-poll on December 14 while as many of the second phase have seen re-poll today.

Though counting for Himachal Pradesh Assembly polls would also take place tomorrow but owing to Gujarat being the home turf of PM Modi and BJP president Shah all eyes will be on Gujarat.

Addressing a press conference today Chief Electoral Officer B B Swain said that of the 37 counting centers 3 were in Ahmedabad and two each in Anand and Surat and there were on each in the remaining 30 districts. Around 20 thousand security personnel including those from central paramilitary forces have been deployed at these centers. Almost as many polling staff will participate in the counting process. For the first time micro observers would be deployed in the counting apart from general observers.
‘The counting will begin at 8am and initially as per the EC guidelines postal ballots would be counted first. The counting of votes of EVMs would begin at 830am. On 16 booths as per EC direction VVPAT slips would also be counted. On completion of counting of all the seats, the VVPAT slips of any one booth of all the 182 seats would be done as part of a pilot project of the EC,’ he said.

Notably, the initial trends were likely to be available from around 9am and all the results would be known by afternoon.
The fates of all the 9 cabinet ministers including CM Vijay Rupani (Rajkot-West), Dy CM Nitin Patel (Mahesana), 11 Ministers of State and 7 Parliamentary secretaries were at stake in the polls. Amid other prominent candidates were Jeetu Vaghani (Bhavnagar West ), former Congress president Arjun Modhwadia (Porbandar) and senior leader Shaktisinh Gohil (Mandvi) , Minister Bhupendra Chudasama (Dholka), Shankar Chaudhary (Vav), Pradeepsinh Jadeja (Vatva) (All BJP) and Alpesh Thakor (Radhanpur), Siddharth Patel (Dabhoi) (both Congress) and congress supported independent Jignesh Mewani (Vadgam) along with Amul Dairy Chairman Ramsinh Parmar (Thasra).
BJP has fielded candidates on all the 182 seats, Congress on 178 seats, BSP 139 seats, NCP 58, Shiv Sena 42, JDU 28 and AAP on 29 seats.

In the last election BJP had won 115, Congress 61, GPP (Keshubhai Patel led which later merged with BJP) and NCP 2 each and JDU and Independent one each.
Maximum 34 candidates were in Mahesana while minimum 2 in Jhalod (ST) constituency.

All the exit polls have predicted victory for BJP which was in power in the state for 22 years. Congress on the other hand has rejected the exit polls and claimed that it would win the polls.

DeshGujarat