Earlier, in the day, party senior leader LK Advani and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley arrived in Ahmedabad to attend Rupani’s oath taking ceremony in Gandhinagar. Alongside, Nitin Patel took oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Gujarat.
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Vijay Rupani, who was elected by the ruling BJP legislators to be their chief ministerial candidate, took oath as Gujarat Chief Minister in Gandhi Nagar’s Mahatma Mandir on Sunday.
BJP president Amit Shah met Mr. Rupani and other leaders to finalise the names of the ministers and to discuss the selection of the party president ahead of the 2017 Assembly elections.
Anandiben had insisted on Nitin Patel as her successor, while Shah stood firm by Rupani.
Sources said Anandiben Patel – who had announced her resignation on Facebook last week, saying she was deferring to BJP’s unwritten age bar – was rooting for Nitin Patel for the post. As a compromise formula, Patel was elevated to be Deputy Chief Minister after intervention of the central leadership, including Modi. Born in Rangoon (now Yangon, in Myanmar) to Ramniklal Rupani in 1956, he grew up in Rajkot where he joined RSS as a school boy.
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Thanking Prime Minister Modi and BJP President Amit Shah for reposing faith in him, Rupani, asserted that his team is fully committed to harnessing aspirations of the poor, marginalised, farmers and youngsters. “They came here to seek blessings”.
