Gandhinagar:

The campaign for the second and final phase of Gujarat assembly polls to be held on remaining 93 seats of 14 districts in North and Central Gujarat on December 14 will end at 5 pm tomorrow.

Like the first phase, the steering for campaign for ruling BJP is in the hands of PM Narendra Modi while that for main opposition Congress was led by its leader Rahul Gandhi.

However the campaign has turned more bitter with scathing attacks and counter attacks from both sides.

While BJP was still maintaining that development was its main and sole poll plank and Congress was trying to attack it on various issues including the alleged failure of issues like demonetization and poor implementation of GST etc yet the narrative has seemingly changed from both sides.

BJP has now alleged that Pakistan and terror elements were trying to interfere in Gujarat elections. The issue of Mani Shankar Aiyar calling PM Modi ‘Neech’ has also become prominent. BJP has also alleged Congress of communal consolidation of votes after its cast based equation making.

Congress has also taken a retaliatory posture and was hitting back at many issues. Bitter questions and counter questions were being thrown at each other. Though other leaders were also in to the campaign including ministers and former ministers yet the center stage was with Modi and Rahul. PAAS leader Hardik Patel was also organizing several rallies against BJP.

For the second phase there are a total of 851 candidates in the fray with DY CM Nitin Patel (Mahesana) , 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) etc being the prominent faces.BJP has fielded 93 candidates, Congress 81, BSP 75, AAP 8, JDU 14, NCP 28 Shiv Sena 17 and 170 form non recognized parties apart from 350 independents.

Maximum 34 candidates were in Mahesana while minimum 2 in Jhalod (ST) constituency. The total number of voters was 22296867 of whom 10748977 were females and 455 third gender. Total 24575 booths have been made for the polling which would take place from 8 am to 5 pm.

Notably in the first phase in which 977 candidates including Vijay Rupani (Rajkot West), BJP state president Jeetu Vaghani (Bhavnagar West ), former Congress president Arjun Modhwadia (Porbandar) and senior leader Shaktisinh Gohil (Mandvi) were in fray, 66.75% voting took place.

Counting will be held on December 18.

DeshGujarat