BJP fields late MLA’s son Harshad Parmar for Gujarat’s Umreth bypoll
A four-time legislator, Govindbhai Parmar first entered the state assembly in 1995 as an independent lawmaker from Sarsa constituency in Anand district
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday fielded Harshad Parmar as its candidate for the Umreth assembly bypoll conducted due to the demise of his father, sitting MLA Govindbhai Parmar.
MLA Govindbhai Parmar died on March 6 after prolonged illness, leading to the vacancy on the seat in the state assembly (HT FILEPHOTO)
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MLA Govindbhai Parmar died on March 6 after prolonged illness, leading to the vacancy in the state assembly
A four-time legislator, Govindbhai Parmar first entered the state assembly in 1995 as an independent lawmaker from Sarsa constituency in Anand district. He retained the seat in the 1998 elections on a Congress ticket. Govindbhai, however, lost subsequent elections and crossed over to the BJP.
Meanwhile, the Sarsa seat was merged into the Umreth seat. In 2012, the BJP fielded Govindbhai but he lost again. Govindbhai avenged his defeat five years later when he defeated the incumbent, Nationalist Congress Party’s Jayant Patel aka Bosky in 2017 by a wide margin and was re-elected in 2022.
Following Govindbhai Parmar’s death earlier this month, the Election Commission of India announced the by-election for the seat.
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His son, Harshad Parmar, is active in local politics and is currently serving as a village sarpanch. This will be his first assembly election.
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His son, Harshad Parmar, is active in local politics and is currently serving as a village sarpanch. This will be his first assembly election.
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The Opposition is yet to name its candidate.
Polling for the Umreth Assembly by-election will be held on April 23, while counting of votes will take place on May 4. The constituency has more than 2.4 lakh voters and over 300 polling stations are expected to be set up for the by-election.
The BJP currently holds 161 of the Gujarat assembly’s 182 seats, the Congress 12, the Aam Aadmi Party 5, the Samajwadi Party 1, while two seats are held by independents.
He is an Ahmedabad-based journalist with more than two decades of experience. His career spans business journalism and general news, with reporting across politics, crime, governance, public policy, business, industry, infrastructure, energy, ports, aviation, the environment, wildlife and social issues. He began his career in feature writing before moving into business journalism, reporting on companies and sectors including energy, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, automobiles and real estate. Over the years, his work expanded to politics, courts, crime, public policy, civic affairs, the environment and wildlife. His reporting has taken him from government offices and courtrooms to factory floors, ports, forests and remote villages, covering stories that range from industrial investments and financial markets to elections, conservation and issues affecting everyday life. While many assignments demand the pace of the daily news cycle, others require sustained reporting over months and years to follow developments beyond the headlines. He started his journalism career with the Asian Age in Ahmedabad in 2002 as a feature writer and sub-editor. Since 2022, he has been working with Hindustan Times. Earlier, he worked with Business Standard, DNA, The Economic Times, Mint and The Times of India. His longest stint was with Mint, where he spent more than eight years reporting across multiple beats. During his career, he has worked in both reporting and editing roles, contributing to page planning, local editions and special editorial projects as newsrooms evolved from print-first operations to digital publishing. Early in his career, he also worked on media and documentary projects with an NGO and as a copywriter at a communications agency before returning to journalism. Away from work, he sometimes makes time for a pair of binoculars, table tennis, cinema and the occasional poem.
