Amit Shah seeks 2nd term from Gandhinagar; Congress's Sonal Patel stands in way

Gujarat's Gandhinagar seat is a high-profile constituency, with its sitting MP being Union Home Minister Amit Shah. It is among 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat, the home state of both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah, and has been with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 1989.

The opposition Congress has fielded Sonal Patel against the senior BJP leader. In the ongoing general elections, which kicked off on Friday, all Gujarat constituencies will poll on May 7, the third leg of the seven-phase nationwide polling. The BJP, which has been in power in Gujarat since 1995, won all 26 Lok Sabha seats here in the 2014 and 2019 general elections.

Who is Congress's Sonal Patel?

Sonal Patel is an All India Congress Committee (AICC) secretary, having previously headed the grand old party's women's wing in the western state (2012-2018). An urban and regional planner, she studied architecture at the Centre of Environment Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, she is also a member several architecture bodies.

Gandhinagar seat

Gandhinagar comes under and shares its name with the state capital; as many as seven out of Gujarat's 182 assembly constituencies make up this seat: Gandhinagar North, Kalol, Sanand, Ghatlodia, Vejalpur, Naranpura, and Sabarmati. While the first two are in the Gandhinagar district, the remaining are in the Ahmedabad district.

Created in 1967, Gandhinagar elected Congress's Somachandbhai Solanki as its first Member of Parliament (MP) that year, and re-elected him in 1971. Amrit Patel (1980) and GI Patel (1984) also won as the party's candidates from here, while Purushottam Mavalankar won it for the Janata Party in 1977.

Since 1989, however, the constituency has been a BJP bastion, with the winning candidates being Shankersinh Vaghela (1989), LK Advani (1991, 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014), Atatl Bihari Vajpayee (1996), Vijaybhai Patel (1996; byelection), and Amit Shah (2019).