Ahmedabad: Assembly elections in Gujarat have till now been a bilateral contest between the BJP and the Congress. With the entry of AAP, the contest is going to be close and tough where every single vote matters for a candidate in several seats. In the past too, there have been close contests with candidates winning by a narrow margin of a just few votes.
If we look at the election history from 1962 to 2017 in Gujarat, Thakor Shankarji holds the record for the MLA winning with the lowest vote margin. He contested from the Congress in 1975 from Kheralu seat and won by a margin of only 11 votes. Earlier in the 1962 assembly election, Zamindar Faizal Abbas won the Matar assembly seat with the lowest margin of 33 votes.
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More recently, in 2007, Brijraj Singh Jadeja, who contested from Jamjogpur assembly seat from Congress, won by just 17 votes while in 2017, Congress MLA Jitu Chaudhary, too won with a narrow margin of votes and joined the BJP. In the last assembly elections in Gujarat, there were at least 16 seats where the candidates won with a margin of less than 3,000 votes and the prospects of both BJP and Congress candidates were affected.
In seven of these seats, the difference between victory and defeat was less than one thousand. Out of these 16 seats, BJP won 10 seats while Congress won 6 seats. In Valsad district's Kaprada Assembly (Scheduled Tribe) seat, BJP candidate Madhubhai Raut lost to Congress candidate Jitubhai Chowdhary by a narrow margin of 170 votes.
In 2017, senior BJP leader Bhupendrasinh Chudasama was successful in winning the Dholka seat by a margin of just 327 votes. Many believe that the BSP, the Nationalist Congress Party and two independent candidates got around 11,000 votes in this seat, which played a key role in the BJP's victory.
