Isudan Gadhvi will be Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) chief ministerial candidate for the next month’s Gujarat Assembly elections, announced party’s national convenor Arvind Kejriwal on Friday.
The candidate was named on the basis of the opinion submitted to the party by the people of the state. Besides national general secretary Gadhvi, AAP’s state unit president Gopal Italia and general secretary Manoj Soratihya were also in the race for the top post.
Kejriwal said the 40-year-old Gadhvi got as many as 73 per cent votes in a poll conducted by the party. Gadhvi hails from a farmers’ family in Dwarka district’s Pipaliya village and belongs to the other backward castes, which account for 48 per cent of the state’s population.
THE MOMENT WE ALL WERE WAITING FOR! 😍
— AAP (@AamAadmiParty) November 4, 2022
AAP National Convenor Shri @ArvindKejriwal announces Shri @isudan_gadhvi as the party's CM face for Gujarat#IsudanGadhvi4GujaratCM pic.twitter.com/8kZgbw5CFT
Kejriwal held a press conference in Ahmedabad to announce the name. Last week, Kejriwal had urged people to contact the party through SMS, WhatsApp, voice mail and e-mail to give their views about who should be the CM candidate from the party in the state, which is currently being ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Kejriwal had said people could submit their points of view till November 3 evening and on the basis of their opinions, the name of the party’s chief ministerial face would be announced the next day.
“We will announce the result on November 4,” he had said last Saturday.
At that time, Kejriwal had also said, “During the Punjab elections, we had asked people as to who should be the next chief minister. People named Bhagwant Mann by a huge majority. And as per the wishes of the public, we made him chief minister.”
The AAP on Thursday announced its ninth list of 10 candidates for the Gujarat polls, taking the number of candidates whose names have been announced so far to 118. Elections to the 182-member Gujarat Assembly will be held in two phases next month – on December 1 and 5, while votes will be counted on December 8.
(With inputs from PTI)
