E-Paper
Delhi Elections 2020: Manish Sisodia trails BJP’s Ravi Negi in Patparganj
Manish Sisodia was expected to win the Patparganj seat easily in the Delhi assembly elections.
Even as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) surged ahead in the counting of votes for the Delhi Assembly elections, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia is facing a tough fight from Ravi Negi of the BJP for the Patparganj seat.
At one point Sisodia, who is also the education minister in the Delhi government, saw his lead whittled down to just over a hundred after two rounds of counting. By the third round, the AAP co-founder was trailing by over 1400 votes. That gap dropped to 754 votes in the fourth round but rose to 1576 votes by the end of the fifth round. At the end of the ninth round, Sisodia was trailing by 1288 votes.
Sisodia was expected to win the contest comfortably.
Patparganj in east Delhi, is one of the most important seats for the AAP after New Delhi constituency which is Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s seat.
Also Watch | Delhi polls | Counting of votes underway, AAP leads in early trends
Sisodia won the seat for two consecutive terms in 2013 and 2015 easily with his vote share in the constituency increasing from 41.5% (2013) to 53.5% (2015).
Laxman Rawat of the Congress is also in the fray. Sisodia and Kejriwal had focussed on turning the narrative towards issues like infrastructure, education, women safety, electricity, water during the campaign for the elections.
The constituency had been a Congress stronghold from 1998 till 2013 when Sisodia ended it. The BJP had last won the seat in 1993.
Five exit polls after the elections on Saturday predicted that the AAP would return to power comfortably while the BJP would win more than the three seats it won in 2015.
