Who is Kantilal Amrutiya? BJP Candidate wins Morbi seat a month after bridge collapse? All you need to know

In the triangular contest of the Gujarat Assembly polls - between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) - ruling party candidate Kantilal Amrutiya has managed to secure a major victory in the Morbi assembly election.

Amtrutiya, who had emerged as a saviour in the bridge collapse tragedy, won by maintaining a lead of more than 61,5000 votes against Congress party candidate and his closest rival Jayantilal Patel.

According to the Election Commission of India’s latest updates, Amrutiya got 1,13,701 votes while 52,121 votes were polled in favour of Congress candidate Jayantilal Patel after 22 rounds of counting.

AAP candidate Pankaj Ransariya, who is also a Patidar, but failed to woo voters and stood in the third spot with over 6,000 votes. Morbi, which is largely dominated by Patidar voters, is considered a traditional stronghold of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

After the end of the ninth round of counting of votes for the Morbi seat of Saurashtra region, Amtrutiya had polled more than 37,500 votes while Patel got over 20,000 votes.

Amrutiya rose to fame after videos of him jumping into the river to rescue the survivors of the Morbi bridge collapse had gone viral. Amrutiya’s this act earned him nationwide praise and the title of "Morbi hero".

Moreover, this is not the first time when Amrutiya had won from the Morbi segment as he had already emerged victorious five times in the past. Jayantilal Patel, on the other hand, had lost five times to BJP rivals in the previous elections.

Morbi came into the limelight after the British-era suspension bridge in the area collapsed into the Machchhu river on October 30, 2022, killing 135 people. According to media reports, this tragedy was believed to change the poll equations.

The ruling BJP, after sensing that Amutiya's popularity will come in handy for the party, dropped its sitting MLA Brijesh Merja, who was also a former minister, and fielded Amrutiya, who was otherwise not in the reckoning as a candidate.

In the recently-concluded assembly polls, Gujarat has registered a voter turnout of 64.33 per cent to 182 seats, a drop of more than 4 per cent compared to the turnout registered in the 2017 polls.

As per the latest data shared by the Election Commission on Tuesday, the voter turnout for the first phase of elections held on December 1 for 89 seats was 63.31 per cent and 65.30 per cent for the second phase of polling held on December 5 for 93 seats.

Nearly 3.16 crore voters out of a total of 4.91 crore registered voters had turned up to exercise their franchise on December 1 and 5, it said. These 3.16 crore voters included 1.69 crore males (66.74 per cent), 1.46 crore females (61.75 per cent) and 445 voters from the 'third gender' category out of 1,391.

(With input from agencies)