The BJP councillor, Hitesh Makwana was elected as the new and fifth mayor of Gandhinagar at the first general board meeting of Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation (GMC) on Thursday. Also, Premalsinh Gol and Jaswant Patel were elected as Deputy Mayor and Standing Committee Chairman of the corporation.
According to the roster, Makwana, who belongs to Schedule Caste, will serve the post for the first term of two and a half years and for the remaining term, a woman will be elected as the mayor of the state capital. Because this time, the first term of the five-year term post has been reserved for the councillor belonging to the Schedule Caste (SC) category.
After getting elected for the top post, Makwana thanked the party and its leadership for putting faith in him. He also said that he will work on the newly added 18 villages in the GMC’s periphery to make them par with the other areas, in terms of development.
The newly elected Gandhinagar mayor is the son of former BJP MLA Punambhai Makwana and the husband of actress Roma Manek.
The appointments came after the recent polls to the GMC wherein the ruling BJP retained power by winning 41 of the total 44 seats of 10 wards. BJP decimated the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party by huge margins, with the Congress winning two seats and AAP winning just one seat in the state capital.
This is the first time that the BJP has had a landslide victory in the GMC election, since the inception of the GMC in 2010. In the first election held in 2011, Congress had won 18 seats, getting the majority while the BJP won 15. However, three Congress councillors defected to the BJP, giving it a majority in the GMC.
