Evening Pulse: BJP sweeps Gandhinagar, Okha and Thara as the Ward 6 recount stays with Congress

By evening, Gujarat's counting day had a clear headline and one awkward footnote. The BJP won all three civic bodies counted on Tuesday: the capital, Okha on the Dwarka coast and Thara in north Gujarat. In Ahmedabad, an open drain is still unexplained four days after a child fell into it. A day of easy victories for the ruling party ended with a reminder of what civic bodies are elected to look after.

The Gandhinagar tally we reported this afternoon held up. The BJP has 38 of the 44 seats, the Congress five and an independent one, ETV Bharat Gujarat, Sandesh and India TV reported. AAP won none. India TV and Oneindia said AAP had contested only 32 seats. Oneindia added that the State Election Commission rejected four of its nominations and five of its candidates withdrew.

One loop from this afternoon is now closed. We flagged a recount demand in Ward 6, where the Congress panel had been declared the winner. Sandesh reported that the BJP asked for the recount and that the result did not change. India TV and Oneindia both list all four Ward 6 seats as Congress wins, and Oneindia names the winners as Hansaben Ninama, Meghnaben Desai, Mehulkumar Rathod and Karmjitsinh Vaghela. Sandesh said five seats is exactly what the Congress needed to claim the post of opposition leader in the corporation, and ETV Bharat also said the party will hold that post.

The evening reports also explain the lone independent. ETV Bharat said Dipikaben Vaghela, who won in Ward 2 (Pethapur), is the wife of Rajendrasinh Vaghela, a former president of the Pethapur municipality. According to ETV Bharat, he backed her after the BJP denied her a ticket, and her win came at the cost of the BJP's Dipti Patel, who chairs the town planning committee. ETV Bharat called the loss a setback for the ruling party.

The two smaller municipalities, which we could not confirm at midday, also went to the BJP. Chitralekha and Gujarat First reported that the party won 33 of Okha's 36 seats, four of them unopposed, and 19 of Thara's 24. Neither outlet gave a full breakdown of the remaining seats in Thara. Chitralekha put turnout at 63.27 percent in Okha and 81.18 percent in Thara, both higher than Gandhinagar's 59.25 percent. As of this evening, we had not seen a formal response from the Congress or AAP state leadership to the results.

Nothing has changed on the two FIRs against Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani since this morning. Up to publication, we found no report of a summons, arrest or bail plea in either case. The BJP has also not yet said who will be Gandhinagar's mayor, and we found no date for the new board's first meeting.

Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi's ceremony at SAL Institute in Sola did take place. PTI, carried by ThePrint, and IANS, carried by The Hans India, reported that 158 people received Indian citizenship certificates. Of them, 126 were granted under the Citizenship Amendment Act and 32 through the district collector's office. They had come from minority communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. According to PTI, Sanghavi said critics who opposed the law for political reasons did not understand what refugee families had been through. IANS quoted Sujal Mayatra, Gujarat's Director of Census Operations, as saying more than 1,500 people had been given citizenship so far.

In Ahmedabad, the search for the ten-year-old visually impaired girl who fell into an open drain near Pirana on Saturday evening was still going on on Tuesday. Sandesh reported that she had not been found on the fourth day and that searchers still did not know where in the line she might be. ETV Bharat Gujarat had earlier described how hard the search is in that line. By publication time, we had found no report that she had been found, no statement from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and no inquiry ordered.