Shiv Sena’s Amit Ghoda wins Palghar Assembly race

Shiv Sena’s Amit Ghoda retained his party’s Palghar Assembly seat by defeating Congress candidate and former Maharashtra minister Rajendra Gavit by a comfortable margin of 18,948 votes along with three other candidates. Mr Ghoda secured 67,129 votes, while Mr Gavit managed to poll 48,181 votes. The Assembly byelection was necessitated due to the demise of sitting Sena MLA Krushna Arjun Ghoda, who died of a heart attack in May 2015.

The other candidates in the fray included former Sena minister Manisha Nimkar who was contesting on a Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (BVA) ticket, who got 36,781 votes. Chandrakant Vartha who contested on CPI-M ticket secured 4,865 votes, while Dileep A Dumada who contested on a Bahujan Mukti Party (BMP) managed to poll just 1,417 votes.

Significantly, a total of 3,162 voters exercised the ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) option. Out of the total electorate of 2.47 lakh voters, 1.61 lakh voters exercised their ballot pushing down the overall voting percentage to 65.24 per cent from the 68.8 per cent recorded in the October 2014 Assembly elections.

This time, however, the BJP did not field its candidate and extended its support to the Sena. In the 2014 Assembly elections BJP’s Dr Premchand T. Gond had secured 34,149 votes and came a distant third. This time, going by the comparison between the 2014 result and the current result, it does appear that the BJP votes were split between Sena’s Ghoda and BVA’s Nimkar. Mr Ghoda bettered his late father’s performance by polling 21,014 more votes.

His father had polled 46,115 votes in the 2014 assembly elections. On the other hand Ms Nimkar, who came third this time, improved on her performance by getting 13,046 more votes this time than her tally of 23,735 votes in 2014.