Lok Sabha Election Results 2019: Shatrughan Sinha trails BJP's Ravi Shankar Prasad in Patna Sahib
BJP leader and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has beaten Shatrughan Sinha to the Patna Sahib constituency in Bihar by over 2.84 lakh votes. The seat was previously held by Mr Sinha, who moved from the BJP to the Congress in April.
The Patna Sahib seat, which was carved out in 2008 after the delimitation process, voted for Mr Sinha in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls by a margin of over 2.65 lakh votes.
The association between Mr Sinha and the BJP had been souring for years before his shift to rivals Congress; the proverbial last straw was being snubbed in favour of Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Mr Sinha had been openly critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah over the past year, his tweet-a-day barbs have been increasingly provocative for the party. In January, he even joined opposition leaders in a mega rally in Kolkata hosted by Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
On joining the Congress, he criticised the BJP as a "one-man show, two-man army" and attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi's demonetisation as "probably the world's biggest scam".
He said, "It was a mindless decision... Several people died... Modi ji's mother was in the queue and we were told it was normal."
The 2019 elections, which spanned six weeks registered the highest ever voter turnout in the history of Indian parliamentary elections. The final voter turnout stands at 67.11 per cent, the Election Commission announced on Wednesday.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) claimed an outsized mandate for a second term in office, with PM Modi's BJP scoring an absolute majority covering large swathes of the country. The BJP has won 300 seats in declared results and is leading in three more in the 543-member Lok Sabha, surpassing its 2014 victory and leaving a shell-shocked opposition struggling to touch even the 100-mark
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