Vipul Patel, president of the BJP’s Anand district unit, was elected on Tuesday as the new chairman of the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union Limited. It is Gujarat’s oldest milk cooperative known as Amul Dairy. Patel’s election ends the reign of Ramsinh Parmar, an OBC who served as the cooperative’s chairman for nearly twenty years.
Kanti Sodha Parmar, who left the Congress and joined the BJP on January 30, has been elected as the cooperative’s vice-chairman. Kanti Sodha succeeds Rajendrasinh Parmar of the Congress party, who has served as the party’s vice-chairman since 2006.
While Vipul Patel runs a district cooperative bank and an Agricultural Produce & Livestock Market Committee (APMC) in the state’s Anand district, Kanti Sodha was elected to the Anand Assembly seat on a Congress ticket in 2017. In the 2022 elections, he was defeated by his BJP opponent, Yogendra Parmar, the son of ousted Amul Dairy chairman Ramsinh Parmar, from the same seat.
The elections, held after a 2.5-year hiatus, were a simple affair, with five of the 15-member Board of Directors leaving the Congress and joining the BJP in the last two weeks. The first to leave was Kanti Sodha. Gautam Chauhan, Sita Chandu Parmar, Sharda Patel, and Ghela Mansinh Zala all joined the BJP after that.
Rajendrasinh Parmar and Sanjay Patel are the only two Congress party leaders on the current Board of Directors.
