Bihar may have decided to give the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) another chance, but the victory margin in some of the seats was very narrow – of less than 1,000.
The NDA, riding on the back of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) best ever performance in Bihar, itself won the election after a close fight, scraping past the majority mark with 124 seats as against the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) led grand alliance’s 111 seats. The majority mark in the 243-seat Assembly was 122.
But in some of the constituencies, the victory margin was wafer thin. In Barbigha, Janata Dal (United) candidate Sudarshan Kumar defeated Congress’ Gajanan Shahi by just 113 votes. In Bhore, victory margin was a mere 462.
The RJD’s Fatehbahadur trumped the BJP’s Satya Narayan in Dehri by a mere 464 votes. It was among any seats like Bakhri, Ramgarh, Chakai, Matihani and Kurhani Assembly seats where victory came after a really close fight.
In Hilsa, the JD(U) candidate won just by 12 votes, according to the Election Commission website, a result contested by the RJD.
According to the results updated on the Election Commission website late Tuesday night, JD(U)’s Krishnamurari Sharan alias Prem Mukhiya has polled 61,848 votes, while the RJD’s Atri Muni alias Shakti Singh Yadav has got 61,836 votes.
“Results declared,” the poll panel wrote in the ‘status’ column for Hilsa seat late Tuesday night. And in the margin column it wrote “12”.
The NDA got past the majority mark late on Tuesday after more than 15 hours of counting of votes. Though the BJP bagged 73 seats, the RJD emerged as the single-largest party winning 76 seats. Its vote share of 23.03 per cent was also the highest for any single party in the Bihar Assembly election.
The Congress managed to win only 19 of the 70 seats it had contested. The Left parties, though, sprang a surprise winning 16 out of the 29 seats the CPI(ML), the CPI and the CPI(M) had contested.
Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM clinched five seats while its alliance partner in Bihar, Mayawati’s BSP, bagged one.
Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party, which pulled out of the NDA and contested nearly 150 seats, managed to win just one.
