NDA vote share crosses 50%, 18 nominees score over 2 lakh margin in Bihar

PATNA: The NDA not only swept Bihar with 39 of 40 seats, nearly eradicating the opposition from the state, but also logged a staggering 53.3% vote share.
Buoyed by CM Nitish Kumar-led JD(U)’s return to its fold and PM Narendra Modi’s mass appeal, the alliance decimated the formidable caste barriers in the state. While BJP topped the chart with a vote share of 23.6%, the other two NDA allies — JD(U) and LJP — secured 21.8% and 7.9% of the total votes polled, respectively.
The victory margins in the state were also unprecedented.Three NDA candidates won by over four lakh votes, four nominees won by over three lakh votes, 18 by over 2 lakh votes and nine by over one lakh votes, reflecting the intensity of the Modi wave that swept the state, leaving the opposition gasping for breath.
BJP and JD(U) had contested 17 Lok Sabha seats each, leaving six for Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP. Kishanganj was the lone holdout constituency where Congress’s Mohammad Jawed defeated JD(U)’s Syed Mahmood Ashraf by a comparatively thin margin of 34,466 votes.
While BJP’s muscular nationalism, Hindutva agenda and welfare poll planks worked wonders for the NDA along with Modi’s image of a strong and decisive leader, the tried-and-tested JD(U)-BJP combine also mattered in the emphatic win of the alliance in the state.
Even in 2014, when JD(U) and BJP fought the Lok Sabha elections separately, the two parties had accounted for a combined vote share of 45.20%. LJP’s vote share in 2014 was 6.4%. This time, however, the major gainer was JD(U) as its vote share increased from 15.8% in 2014 to 21.8% now.
For the opposition camp in the state, the writing is on the wall. With the assembly elections just a little over a year away, the opposition camp will have to regroup and rework its strategy fast to face the Modi-Nitish onslaught.
Two of the four Mahagathbandhan partners – RJD and Congress – which together contested 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state, managed to bag just 23.1% of total votes polled. RJD’s vote share was 15.4%, down 5.6% from 20.10% in 2014 and Congress accounted for 7.7% vote share, down 1.37% from 8.40% in 2014.
The victory margins were staggering. Ashok Kumar Yadav of BJP lead the pack by defeating Badri Kumar Purbey of Vikassheel Insaan Party by a margin of 4,54,940 votes in Madhubani. The second best performer was BJP’s Giriraj Singh, who defeated former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president and CPI nominee Kanhaiya Kumar by a margin of 4,22,217 votes in Begusarai.
The huge victory margins also proved that the 2014 Lok Sabha election, when the people of the state had voted by rising above caste considerations, was not a fluke. In a state like Bihar, where nothing mattered more than caste not so long ago, the emergence of Narendra Modi has created a new era of politics, at least as far as Lok Sabha elections are concerned.
Though plagued by myriad problems like unemployment, infrastructure bottlenecks and poor education facilities, people of the state chose to vote for a strong leadership at the Centre by setting aside caste factor.
“It’s true that Bihar is lagging behind many other states in terms of development. However, development is possible only if a strong PM is at the helm of affairs. In the present scenario, no political leader comes even closer to Modi when it comes to exhibiting decisive leadership. The youths in our constituency had voted for BJP just to make Modi the PM of the country again,” said Alok Mani, a first-time voter from Darbhanga.
Incidentally, BJP’s Darbhanga nominee Gopaljee Thakur, a Lok Sabha debutant, opened the score for NDA in the state by defeating veteran RJD leader Abdul Bari Siddiqui by a margin of 2,67,979 votes.