He was elected the new leader of the BJP legislative party at a meeting of state MLAs on Sunday afternoon in the presence of central observers Narendra Singh Tomar and Prahlad Joshi. His name was proposed by CM Rupani.
After the meeting, union minister and BJP’s Gujarat-in-charge Narendra Singh Tomar came out and announced his name to the media.
Bhupendra Patel is known to be a a protege of former Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel.
He had won the Ghatlodiya seat by a margin of 117,000 votes in the 2017 assembly elections, the largest margin in that poll.
Patel was not in any ministry earlier, but he was twice chairperson of the Ahmedabad municipal corporation and once headed the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority.
After Rupani’s surprise resignation on Saturday the buzz was that the BJP may settle for a patidar MLA to get the caste equation right before the state polls. Other names — including that of Dy CM Nitin Patel — were doing the rounds, but finally the party settled for Bhupendra Patel.