Old rivals lock horns again

LS CONSTITUENCY WATCH/VADODARA

On April 20, voters of Vadodara will make a choice between a candidate they sent to Parliament in the 1996 general elections and a candidate they sent to Parliament in the two subsequent general elections of 1998 and 1999.

However, the odds weigh heavily in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party's sitting MP Jayaben Thakkar who won the last election by a margin of close to one lakh votes.

The Congress' Satyajit Gaekwad had won the seat in 1996 by a margin of just 17 votes. A re-counting of the votes was taken up to establish the slender victory margin for the Congress candidate.

Interestingly, Gaekwad became a Member of Parliament directly after being elected as municipal councilor. He was also president of the All India Youth Congress when he won the Vadodara seat.

While the BJP re-nominated Thakkar in the party's second list of 18 candidates on March 15, the Congress announced the candidature of Gaekwad late on Saturday.

The Vadodara parliamentary constituency seat has remained with the Bharatiya Janata Party since 1998, when Thakkar defeated Gaekwad. The Congress candidate had received a jolt a day before the polls when Shantadevi, the maharani of Vadodara, issued advertisements in vernacular dailies stating that Satyajit Gaekwad was not connected with the royal family of Vadodara.

In the last parliamentary elections (in 1999), Thakkar defeated Urmilaben Patel, wife of former Gujarat chief minister Chimanbhai Patel. The BJP candidate secured over 3.22 lakh votes against over 2.30 votes secured by Patel.

"The Vadodara parliamentary seat is one of the safest seats for the BJP and the name of Jayaben Thakkar was a unanimous choice. We expect the BJP candidate to win the seat with a higher victory margin this time," said a BJP spokesperson here.

The Congress camp too is upbeat with the announcement of Gaikwad's nomination as candidate. In fact, in the list of probables sent by the state unit to the central committee for consideration, only one name - that of Gaekwad - was sent.

"Gaekwad is from Vadodara and has worked at the grass-root level in the constituency for a long time. There was no second choice for the Vadodara seat," said a Congress spokesperson.

Interestingly, the Bharatiya Janata Party made a clean sweep of all the 13 Assembly seats that fall under the Vadodara Parliamentary constituency in the December 2002 Gujarat elections.

BJP candidates won in Chhota Udaipur, Jetpur, Nasvadi, Sankheda, Dabhoi, Savli, Vadodara City, Sayajigunj, Raopura, Vaghodia, Vadodara Rural, Padra and Karjan.