GandhinagaruOctober 3, 2025 01:54 PM IS
First revealed: October 3, 2025 at 1:53pm
Chandrakant Raghunath Patil was scheduled to resign as Gujarat BJP chief after greater than 5 years of profitable duties, together with over 5 years of extension, but it surely was a shocking alternative for the job. Initially, it was the primary “non-Gujarati” to carry the submit, as he’s extra generally identified, from Maharashtra, Patil or Jalgaon in CR.
Given his lengthy tenure in Gujarat, he hardly ever frowned. The previous police officer has been up the Lang and is considering of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah from the states the place the BJP has grown and grown. Moreover, Patil was thought of a Modi decide.
The 70-year-old took over in July 2020, and the BJP was nonetheless recovering from the 2017 Congress vote. There, Patider’s incitement reduce the get together to 99 seats within the 182-member residence, leading to a skinny majority. Patil additionally took over throughout the first covid wave when public sentiment was excessive for the federal government.
A number of months after his appointment, in November 2020, Gujarat noticed Baipol in eight congressional seats vacant by the Congress MLA, who have been in exile within the BJP. The BJP has gained every thing.
Patil oversaw the shocking determination to remake the complete cupboard in Gujarat forward of the 2022 parliamentary elections, with the late Vijay Rupani being changed by the Prime Minister and new faces of many sitting MLAs, adopted by the implementation of age and tenure requirements for ticket distribution in native elections.
Sequential polls have demonstrated Patil’s cleverness by making certain that the adjustments didn’t backfire. In March 2021, the BJP gained a convincingly in an area bodily election, together with all six municipal corporations. In October 2021, the get together not solely took the council fortress of Gandhinagar Municipal Companies, but additionally gained from 41 of the 44 wards and wiped it out.
The 2022 parliamentary vote was then held. This was seen as a litmus take a look at of whether or not an overhaul of the BJP state unit would assist duck anti-tenurs and whether or not the 2017 outcomes have been positioned within the again. The BJP opposed the opposite aspect in each counts by profitable the parliamentary elections with the most important majority in Gujarat historical past (156, or 85% of the meeting seats).
When Patil’s three-year tenure resulted in July 2023, the BJP gave him an extension and selected to go along with him for the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Patil once more gained 25 of Gujarat’s 26 Lok Saba seats within the BJP regardless of the set-offs in different components of the nation.
Transfer to Delhi
When Modi returned to energy as PM in 2024, Paatir was directed to the Union Cupboard as Minister Jalshakti. Since then, his resignation as Gujarat’s BJP chief has been imminent. Nonetheless, the get together struggled to search out the fitting various.
Among the many subsequent Gujarat BJP Chief frontrunners, anticipated to be a “consensus” alternative, is Minister of State Jagdish Vishwakarma or Jagdish Panchal, an OBC chief and MLA from Ahmedabad.
As chief, Patil’s initiative within the Gujarat BJP included the institution of a “web page committee” statewide. Every panel was answerable for a listing of get together supporters dedicated on every web page of the election function. Modi expressed his gratitude for the transfer in a letter to the BJP Gujarat unit.
Patil launched the idea of getting a celebration’s mission to native bodily voting, and launched a system for better interplay between the BJP ministers and get together employees and folks.
Equally, a transfer that didn’t go down was the management (upkeep and motion) of Gujarat cattle within the 2022 city invoice. Equally, the challenge that interlinks the waters of Par, Tapi and Narmada, reportedly supported by Patil, was positioned in angle following protests by the tribes.
At one other time of controversy in April 2021 amid a disastrous scarcity of antiviral removers within the second wave of Covid-19, he introduced that he would distribute 5,000 vials from the Surat BJP workplace to the poor.
Particulars of the choice to take away two highly effective basic secretaries of the state unit, Bhargav Bhatt and Pradipsinh Vaghela, stay unclear. Two posts are nonetheless open.
Regardless of the queue, the senior BJP chief stated: “I charge Patil as the most effective president the get together has ever had. He launched killer instincts into state items, by no means giving up and used the information to handle polls.
The get together chief added that Patil’s model might have been “my approach or freeway,” however ultimately the BJP obtained. “He is aware of how you can get issues finished, and he did that.”
One other get together chief stated, “Chances are you’ll oppose Patil’s model of functioning, however nobody can deny that he has revived the BJP after the 2017 parliamentary elections and the just about fiasco of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
