Ahmedabad : The BJP has won the two Gujarat seats that Narendra Modi vacated this May as he headed to Delhi to take over as Prime Minister. And it has also won six of the nine assembly seats where by-elections were held.
But it will have to share the headline in Gujarat with the Congress, which has won three seats, all of them wrested from the BJP.
Written off in the state after a rout in state elections less than two years ago and having won not a single seat in national elections in May, the Congress staged its surprise comeback in Mangrol, Deesa and Khambaliya.
The BJP has won Vadodara, the Lok Sabha seat that PM Modi vacated when he opted to keep Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh as his Lok sabha constituency and so its record of 26-0 in the Lok Sabha from Gujarat is unsullied.
It has also won the other Modi seat, Maninagar in Ahmedabad that he represented for many years as Gujarat chief minister.
These by-elections were seen as a test of whether what the BJP calls the “Modi wave†endures.
It was also the first big electoral test for Anandiben Patel, who succeeded Mr Modi as Gujarat chief minister.
