New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party on Friday announced that senior party leader Isudan Gadhvi would be its chief minister candidate from Gujarat which goes to polls in the first week of December.
On 29 October, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal urged people to send in their recommendations about who they wanted to see as the party’s chief minister candidate for Gujarat.
The window for suggestions was open till 3 November.
The party’s national general secretary Gadhvi was in the race with state unit president Gopal Italia and general secretary Manoj Soratihya, party sources said.
Elections to the 182-member Gujarat Assembly will be held in two phases next month – on 1 and 5 December, and votes will be counted on 8 December. The state will witness a three-cornered contest – between the ruling BJP, main opposition Congress and the AAP.
A popular TV personality, Gadhvi quit journalism to take a plunge into politics last year to emerge as the AAP’s most prominent face in Gujarat.
In the last 14 months, Gadhvi has toured Gujarat twice and travelled 1.10 lakh km to galvanise public opinion against the two traditional parties — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress — and give a chance to the AAP.
AAP is looking at the impending election in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat – both held by the BJP – to catapult itself as the ruling party’s main challenger. A win in either of these states would definitively sideline the Congress which has seen a string of electoral debacles in the last eight years.
AAP will certainly be looking at a decent show in these states for its larger goal of getting recognition as a “national party”.
Also read: ‘PM has to look after India. Give us Gujarat’ — AAP seeks Modi’s help to ‘protect his izzat abroad’