AHMEDABAD: Gujarat Assembly will have three Muslim members this time.
Three Muslim candidates fielded by the Congress emerged victorious in the just-concluded Assembly elections.
In 2012, two candidates from the minority community had made it to the Assembly on Congress’ ticket.
The Congress this time fielded five Muslim candidates, while the BJP did not nominate anyone from the community.
The Rahul Gandhi-led party offered three urban seats– Jamalpur-Khadia and Dariapur in Ahmedabad, and Surat-West– to Muslim candidates.
It won the two seats in Ahmedabad, while the BJP retained Surat-West.
Imran Khedawala won Jamalpur-Khadia seat in Ahmedabad; Gyasuddin Shaikh in Dariapur and Mohammed Javid Pirzada in Wankaner.
Sitting MLA from Dariapur, Sheikh succeeded in retaining the Muslim-dominated seat in Ahmedabad city, defeating BJP’s Bharat Barot by 6,187 votes by securing 63,712 votes.
The Congress succeeded in wresting Jamalpur-Khadia seat from the BJP.
Khedawala, who contested for the first time defeated two-term sitting MLA and BJP candidate Bhushan Bhatt by over 29,300 votes. He got 75,346 votes.
The opposition party also managed to retain Wankaner constituency in Rajkot district where its Muslim candidate Mohammed Javid defeated BJP candidate Jitendra Somani by 1,361 votes in a tightly-contested election. Mohammed Javid got 72,588 votes.
The Aam Aadmi Party, which contested the Gujarat polls for the first time, also fielded a Muslim candidate, Usman Gani Sherasiya, from the seat but he managed to get only 2,808 votes.
Bhatt had in 2012 defeated Congress’ Samir Sipai.
The Congress’ Muslim candidate in Surat-West constituency, Iqbal patel, lost to BJP’s Purnesh Modi by a large margin of over 77,000 votes.
In Vagra constituency of Bharuch district, the party’s candidate, Suleiman Patel, lost to BJP’s Arunsinh Rana.
In the 2012 Assembly elections, the Congress had offered tickets to six Muslims, out of whom two had won.
The minority community forms 9.67 per cent of the total population in the state.
With PTI inputs