The lotus bloomed ever bigger this year in Gujarat as the BJP won a historic mandate, winning a record seventh consecutive term and breaking both its own record from 2002 and a 37-year-long record.
Winning 156 seats, the BJP overwhelmingly defeated not only Congress, which won a paltry 17 seats, but also its own 127-seat record from 2002 under then-CM Narendra Modi. The biggest change, however, would be its overturning the Congress's 1985 record when the party had won 149 seats under Madhavsinh Solanki.
Driven by a campaign centred around PM Narendra Modi, who exhorted people to vote "for the son of Gujarat," the BJP also had a 52.5 per cent vote share with over 1.6 crore votes, the highest vote share in its entire electoral history in the state since 1990, the first time it contested the Gujarat polls.
In the 1990 election, the party won 26.69 per cent of votes, and it has only seen an upward trend since then, rising steadily in almost every election with the exception of 2007, when it fell from 49.12 per cent to 47.85.