Congress' Last Bastion in Gujarat Falls to BJP

PM Narendra Modi's BJP today Tuesday July 22,2014 stormed the last urban Congress citadel in Gujarat, winning 41 of the 60 seats in the Junagadh municipal corporation. It has not only wrested back the Junagadh civic body that it lost to the Congress in 2009, but now also controls all eight municipal corporations in the state.

The 8 Municipal Corporations of Gujarat are -

• Ahmedabad
• Rajkot
• Surat
• Vadodara
• Jamnagar
• Bhavnagar
• Junagadh and
• Gandhinagar

The Congress' diminution is now more or less complete. The BJP had earlier wrested the Gandhinagar municipal corporation from it.

Junagadh in Saurashtra has been seen as a Congress stronghold. The civic polls were also being watched closely because these are the first elections in many years that were held with a person other than Mr Modi in the chief minister's chair. For Anandiben Patel, the successor that Mr Modi handpicked in May this year, the emphatic victory is an important validation.

The BJP already controls more than 75 per cent of the nagarpalikas or 120 in Gujarat

Im the 2014 general elections BJP had won all 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state, which has given the country its new Prime Minister.

In elections held in December 2012, Narendra Modi had won a fourth successive term as chief minister with the BJP winning 117 of the 182 seats in the Gujarat assembly. Congress won only 55 seats