Bihar Election: Close contest in 11 seats; RJD vote-share rises, JD (U) drops

When the 32nd or the penultimate round of votes were counted in Hilsa Assembly seat, Arti Muni alias Shakti Singh Yadav was leading by 48 votes and the RJD candidate, as well as his rival JD (U)'s Krishnamurari Sharan, were on the edge.

Another 277 votes were to be counted in the 33rd and final round and Yadav had an edge -- he had won the 2015 Assembly polls by 26,076 votes -- but the EVMs held something else. Sharan bagged 146 votes to pip the RJD leader by 12 votes, the thinnest victory margin in the latest edition of Bihar Assembly elections.

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Besides Hilsa, there are ten other constituencies which saw a close contest with the victory margin remaining below the 1,000 mark. Of this, the NDA won five -- JD (U) with four and BJP one -- while the RJD won three while the CPI, LJP and an independent bagged one each.

In three constituencies each, the RJD and the JD (U) were the runner-up while the BJP came second in two. CPI, Congress, CPI(ML)L and BSP were the nearest rivals to the winner in one each seat.

A further break up of the 11 seats showed that the victory margin in six were below 500 votes, including Hilsa. RJD and JDU had two such seats while BJP and LJP had one each.

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Among the highest margin, there were four seats which saw victory margin over 50,000 with CPI(ML)L, AIMIM, RJD and JD (U) winning one each. The highest margin was in Balrampur where CPI(ML)L's Mahboob Alam won by 53,597 votes against Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP). In 2015 polls, Alam had won by 20419 votes.

The second-highest victory margin went to AIMIM in Amour where its candidate won by 52,515 votes against JD (U).

It was a Congress sitting seat, which it won by 51,997 votes in 2015 polls but sitting MLA Abdul Jalil Mastan could bag only 31863 votes while the winner Aktharul Imran got 94459 votes and the runner-up Zaba Zafar won 41944 votes.

An analysis showed that the victory margin in 76 seats were in the range of 10-20,000 votes while it was 20-30,000 in 44 seats, 30-40,000 in 22 and 40-50,000 in 14 constituencies.

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The analysis of vote-share showed that RJD improved its tally from 18.35% in 2015 to 23.11% this time while the BJP saw a decline from 24.42% to 19.46%. However, one has to keep in mind that the number of seats contested by RJD rose from 101 to around 140 this time while the BJP's saw a drop from 157 to 110.

However, the vote-share of JD (U) declined from 16.83% to 15.39% despite it contesting more seats -- 101 in 2015 as against 115 this time. In the 2015 polls, the JD(U) had fought the election in alliance with RJD and Congress while in 2002, it contested along with the BJP.

Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM, which had an impressive show, bagged 1.24% of the vote-share fighting 20 seats -- up from 0.21% vote-share five years ago when it contested just six seats.

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Among the Left parties, CPI(M) improved its vote-share despite contesting less seats this time. It rose from 0.61% when it contested 38 seats to 0.65% contesting six seats as part of Maha Gadbandhan and winning two.

While the data on CPI(ML)L, which won 12 out of 19 seats, was not separately available on the Election Commission website, the CPI's vote-share showed that it shrunk from 1.36% while contesting 98 seats in 2015 to 0.83% while contesting six seats.

NOTA polled 1.68% or 7.06 lakh votes this time as against 9.47 lakh or 2.48% of the votes in 2015 Assembly polls.