By-polls to nine Assembly and one LS seat in Gujarat to be held tomorrow

AHMEDABAD: By-elections to nine Assembly and one Lok Sabha seat in Gujarat will be held tomorrow.

The nine Assembly seats that are going to polls are Maninagar, Anand, Limkheda, Deesa, Matar, Talaja, Tankara, Khambhalia and Mangrol.

Vadodara is the lone Lok Sabha seat going for by-polls in Gujarat, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi vacated this seat after winning with huge margin.

As per the last count, 45 candidates are in fray for the Assembly seats and 4 for the Vadodara Lok Sabha seat.

By-polls were necessitated on these seats as sitting BJP MLAs gave their resignations after they won Lok Sabha election of 2014, including Modi, who also vacated Maninagar seat as sitting MLA.

Though all these seats were earlier held by BJP, Congress is hoping to make a dent this time by leveraging the absence of Modi in Gujarat. Thus, the elections are also seen as a litmus test for Chief Minister Anandi Patel, who along with local BJP leaders took this task seriously and held whirlwind campaigns across all these seats in the last one week.

The counting of votes will be conducted on September 17.