There will be direct face off among 452 candidates in the Lok Sabha polls for all 26 seats in Gujarat. The Chief Electoral Officer, in state, issued the list of candidates on each of the seats remained qualified after the scrutiny.
The district election officers in state disqualified 120 nominations after the round of scrutiny that was held on Friday. That is more than 20% of total nomination were filed across the state and that was 572 till the last date. The maximum nominations were filed for Surendranagar Lok Sabha seat with 48 forms and after scrutiny, 43 were validated by the authorities. As many as 46 nominations were filed for Jamnagar seat, but scrutiny disqualified 12 forms and now there are only 34 candidates for the polls on the seat. Next comes Gandhinagar constituency from where BJP chief Amit Shah is also a candidate, where 45 nominations were filed but now there are only 34 candidates on this seat too after scrutiny.
Sources from the CEO's office said, "The candidates whose details had discrepancies while filing affidavits are deemed to be disqualified. Finally, there are 472 candidates but they can withdraw their nominations by April 8. The number will go down further as dummy candidates are also included in the list of 472."
The minimum number of candidates remains from Chhota Udepur and Valsad seats with only 9 in fray. Both these seats are reserved for the Schedule Tribes. Besides, the bypolls are also going to be held in Gujarat over four assembly seats and the authorities had received 83 nominations from candidates but after scrutiny, there are 68 candidates in total. The highest number of candidates are on Jamnagra Rural seat and that is 28, while Manavadar seat has least number of candidate that is 8.
The polling date for Gujarat is April 23 in the third phase and elections will be held on 26 Lok Sabha seats and bypolls for four assembly seats together. There are 4.51 crore voters in Gujarat registered on election commission's list.