The Congress party on Thursday won the Muslim and Dalit-dominated Danilimda assembly segment in Ahmedabad city, despite the AAP and AIMIM cutting into its votes and the BJP putting up a strong fight.
Sitting Congress MLA Shailesh Parmar won by defeating his nearest rival, BJP’s Nareshbhai Vyas, by a margin of 13,525 votes.
Parmar polled 68,906 votes compared to 55381 votes cast in favour of Vyas. AAP candidate Soma Kapadia polled 22,934 votes, while AIMIM’s Kaushika Parmar garnered 2,464 votes, according to provisional data from the Election Commission.
Danilimda emerged as a high-profile seat as the BJP and the Congress locked themselves into a prestige fight, with the saffron camp pulling out all stops to wrest the seat that it has never won since it came into existence in 2012 following delimitation.
Despite a three-cornered contest that followed the AAP’s entry into the fray, the Congress managed to win Danilimda, which a Scheduled Caste (SC)-reserved urban assembly seat. It has around 2,65,000 registered voters, of whom a third are Muslims and Dalits. The remaining are from Patel and Kshatriya communities.
Shailesh Parmar, who is also the Congress party's deputy leader in the outgoing Gujarat assembly, has been winning the seat since 2012. In 2012 and 2017, he won by a margin of around 32,000 votes and 14,000 votes respectively.
