Gujarat: After Lok Sabha poll debacle, Paresh Dhanani offers to resign

Leader of Opposition in the Gujarat Assembly Paresh Dhanani has offered to resign from the post in wake of the debacle that was Congress' performance in the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls.

The party was routed for the second time in a row after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept all the 26 seats. Manish Doshi, the Congress spokesperson, dismissed rumours that Dhanani had resigned from the post. "He has offered to resign. As of now, it has not been accepted," said Doshi.

Dhanani, an MLA from Amreli, had also contested in the Lok Sabha polls from Amreli seat which he lost to BJP's Naran Kachhadiya by a margin of over 2 lakh votes.

Meanwhile, Dhanani has written to the chief minister seeking his intervention on the poor condition of farmers and their animals in view of the drought-like situation in the state. In a letter, Dhanani said that the situation has been worsened by the fall in a number of gauchar land in the state. He said that against 2,625 villages in the state that lacked a gauchar land, by 2017 the number had increased to 2,754. "This rise is because land is being taken from villages and handed over to industries," Dhanani said. He said in a period of just 1.5 years the gauchar land of 129 villages had disappeared. He also added that a government that claimed to be protecting cows had extended help to just 30% of the 667 gaushalas (cow shelters) in the state. Pointing to further callousness on the part of the state, he said that the Gauchar Development Board which was formed in 2015-16 had not not selected even one village for development of gauchar land in the year 2017-18.