Junagadh Municipal Corporation Election 2009

Congress today managed to ensure comfortable victory in the elections of Mayor and other office bearers in the Junagadh Municipal Corporation 2009. The elections in this small corporation had assumed considerable significance as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had thrown all his weight in the civic elections and later in the mayoral elections also.

Though, for the first time after ten years Congress had won in the civic elections defeating the ruling BJP, leaders of BJP tried to make all efforts to turn table against Congress in the mayoral election. Congress had problem of selecting office bearers because of plenty of aspirants and BJP wanted to cash in on this.

However, ultimately Satish Virda(Satish Ahir) who is fondly called Satish Captain was elected mayor, Girish Kotecha deputy mayor and Bhagabhai Rada chairman of the Standing Committee. Former Deputy Chief Minister Narhari Amin and party general secretary Nishit Vyas were sent from here to oversee the entire process.

In the 51 member committee BJP has 21 members while Congress 26. Among the rest three are of BSP and one independent. However, in the mayoral election BJP candidates got 21 and all the rest (30) went to Congress.

Chief Minister Narendra Modi had tried his best to retain Junagadh Municipal Corporation for two reasons. It was to negate the effect of not so good performance of BJP in Gujarat in Lok Sabha elections and to set the ball rolling for bye elections to seven Assembly seats scheduled for September this year.

The leader of the opposition will be Mahendra Mashroo BJP MLA Junagadh.