Gujarat’s local body elections on 26 April 2026 produced a sweeping win for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which took all 15 municipal corporations and the majority of the 84 municipalities, 34 district panchayats and 260 taluka panchayats that went to the polls, according to Wikipedia’s summary. The result is a show of strength ahead of the 2027 Gujarat Legislative Assembly election.
In Ahmedabad, the Amdavad Municipal Corporation’s 192 seats were split 160 to the BJP and 32 to Congress, India TV reported on the counting day, 28 April. The BJP’s tally is about 83 percent of the house. Counting for the polls was scheduled on 28 April and the process was to be completed by 30 April, according to Zee News, which also reported that the State Election Commission used a multi-EVM system.
The scale of the exercise was large. Of 9,900 elected seats, 730 went uncontested, Wikipedia said, and the BJP won more than 6,472 of the seats overall. Turnout was 55.1 percent in the municipal corporations, 65.53 percent in the municipalities, 66.64 percent in the district panchayats and 67.26 percent in the taluka panchayats. Nine municipal corporations were elected for the first time, and elections to the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation are to be held at a later date.
The opposition made little headway. Congress made minor gains, according to the summary, while the Aam Aadmi Party suffered a setback from the gains it had made in the previous round of local elections. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and the Samajwadi Party also entered Gujarat civic politics, which adds to the number of parties in local contests even though their seat counts were small in the reports reviewed.
The State Election Commissioner, Dr S. Muraleekrishna, announced the polling date, and the schedule included rules on EVM use and OBC reservation, as the Zee News headline indicated. Reservation for other backward classes in local bodies has been a contested subject in Gujarat, and the reports reviewed here do not describe how the quota affected candidate selection.
Some simple ratios show the scale. The BJP’s 160 of 192 seats in Ahmedabad is about 83 percent. Its 6,472 seats out of 9,900 is about 65 percent of all elected seats, and the 730 uncontested seats are about 7 percent of the total. These figures are IndiaX24’s calculations from the numbers reported by Wikipedia and India TV, and they will change if later corrections are made to the official tallies.
Six months on, the results frame the politics of the state. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel campaigned in the city under the “Maru Saher, Maru Gaam” banner, according to Sandesh, and the party’s organisational strength in the corporations gives it a base for the 2027 assembly contest. The opposition has to decide whether to rebuild in the cities or focus on rural Gujarat, where the drought and farmers’ protests described elsewhere in IndiaX24’s reporting give it an opening. IndiaX24 will report on the Gandhinagar corporation election when its date is announced. Voters in Gandhinagar will have to wait for their own poll.
Featured image: A cultural event marking Amdavad’s 615th birthday in Ahmedabad (file photo, February 2026). Photo by Riyas16, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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