One-third of Congress MPs won with lowest margins

One-third of the newly elected Congress members of the Lok Sabha were among the 50 candidates who won with the minimum margin as per the results announced by the Election Commission on May 16.

Updated on: May 20, 2014, 01:02:39 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Congress appears to be the biggest beneficiary of some close contests in this summer’s polls.

One-third of the newly elected Congress members of the Lok Sabha were among the 50 candidates who won with the minimum margin as per the results announced by the Election Commission on May 16.

Their number was one more than that of the BJP, which has 282 members in the 16th lower house, indicating that the grand old party of India benefited the most from close contests.

As many as 14 Congress candidates of its total 44 find their names in the list of 50 candidates. Some of the prominent Congress leaders who scraped through because of the multi-cornered contest included outgoing petroleum minister Veerappa Moily, son of President Pranab Mukherjee, Abhijit and outgoing minister of state human for resource development Shashi Tharoor.

The BJP, which with 31% votes got the absolute majority — the lowest ever vote percentage to cross the mid-way mark in Lok Sabha — has just 13 winners in this list.

But, where the Congress was not a match for the BJP was in the top winning margins. Of the 50 biggest margins of victory, the BJP had 36 winners with the Congress just managing two.

One of them was Congress president Sonia Gandhi who won with a margin of 3.52 lakh. Her victory margin was, however, four thousand votes less than Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary who won from Baharampur in West Bengal.

The highest victory margin in 2014 election was that of prime minister-designate and BJP leader Narendra Modi from Vadodara in Gujarat. He defeated his nearest rival by 5.70 lakh votes.

Former Army chief and BJP candidate V K Singh had the second highest margin of 5.67 lakh votes. Modi won from Varanasi seat by over 3.71 lakh votes.

The 2014 polls have witnessed some of the biggest victory margins in recent times with the BJP gaining from multi-cornered contest in politically important Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where the party got 93 of the 120 seats.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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