Varanasi: BJP candidate Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won for the third consecutive time from the country’s most high profile Varanasi Lok Sabha seat. Prime Minister Modi defeated his nearest rival Ajay Rai by 1,52,513 votes. While the margin of victory of Prime Minister Modi was much less than the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he also got fewer votes than the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Workers took to the streets as soon as PM scored a hat-trick
As soon as the Prime Minister’s hat-trick victory was announced, BJP workers came out on the streets to celebrate. The workers expressed their happiness by bursting crackers and feeding sweets to each other. However, senior party leaders also looked disappointed as the margin of victory was not much. Earlier, in the counting of votes which started at 8 am amid tight security at the counting center in Pahadia, the Prime Minister was leading in the initial trends of counting of postal ballots, but after the counting of postal ballots, in the first phase of counting of EVM votes, he fell behind Indi alliance candidate Ajay Rai by more than 6000 votes.
In the second round, he took the lead by a small margin and this trend continued till the 30th round. During the round-wise counting, Ajay Rai of the Indi alliance was seen competing strongly in every round. This trend continued in every round. In the 30th and final round, BJP candidate Prime Minister Narendra Modi got 612970 votes, Ajay Rai of the Indi alliance got 460457 votes and Athar Jamal Lari of BSP got 33766 votes.
In 2014, PM Modi got 58,1022 votes
It is worth noting that in the 2014 elections, the then BJP candidate Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a total of 581022 votes and Arvind Kejriwal of Aam Aadmi Party, who came second, got 209238 votes. In the election, Ajay Rai of Congress got 75614 votes, CA Vijay Prakash of BSP got 60579 votes and Kailash Chaurasia of SP got 45291 votes. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the voters of Kashi gave a huge majority to Prime Minister Modi. He got a total of 6,74,664 votes. Samajwadi Party candidate Shalini Yadav came second. Shalini Yadav got 1,95,159 votes. Shalini Yadav has now joined the BJP.
In 2019, Ajay Rai came third for the third consecutive time and got 1,52,548 votes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a big victory for the second time by a margin of 4,79,505 votes. Still, voting took place in Varanasi in the last phase of the Lok Sabha elections. Prime Minister Modi got 56.37 percent votes. The increasing popularity of BJP due to Balakot airstrike after the Pulwama attack contributed a lot to this.
