Gujarat elections 2012: Fate of Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh CM's at stake
certainly, and that is the huge voter turnout, nearly 70 per cent. Everytime this has happened, a regime has changed. CPM lost Bengal when 84 per cent of the electorate came out to vote.
THE WOMEN WHO CHALLENGE MODI
Two women, both with the blessings of Modi-baiter Keshubhai Patel, will be putting up a symbolic fight to Modi. The two homemakers pitch-forked in the polls are IAS officer Sanjiv Bhatt's wife Shweta (Congress) who is directly taking on Modi in Maninagar and slain former BJP minister Haren Pandya's wife Jagruti (GPP, Ellisbridge seat).
Keshubhai Patel has not fielded any candidate from Maninagar where Shweta Bhatt is taking on the chief minister single-handedly.
Each has an axe to grind against Narendra Modi; each believes the chief minister or at least his party had wronged her husband.
Though both stress on local issues, there is no doubt they are contesting because of what happened to their husbands. “I was merely an observer when Sanjiv was fighting his battle with corruption but I decided to stand against Modi a year ago after the brutalities inflicted on my family,” says Shweta, whose husband Sanjiv Bhatt, an IPS officer now suspended, has testified that Modi had asked the police to go slow on rioters in 2002.
Jagruti’s husband, slain BJP minister Haren Pandya, had represented the seat she is contesting. “Even though I hadn’t taken the legal or political route,
