A total of 610 mainly regional and small political parties across the country failed to win even a single seat in the Lok Sabha elections while 530 got zero per cent vote share.
A total of 13 parties managed to enter the Lok Sabha by bagging just one seat each, according to data available with the Election Commission.
Some of the parties which drew a blank in the Lok Sabha battle are Forward Bloc, Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Jannayak Janata Party (JJP), Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF), Rashtriya Lok Samta Party, Sarva Janata Party (SJPA), Jammu & Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party, All India N.R. Congress (AINRC), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the PMK.
Of the 610 parties, 80 got about 1 per cent or less vote percentage in the overall vote share while the remaining 530 got zero per cent.
A total of 37 political parties will mark their presence in Lok Sabha, with the BJP alone grabbing 303 seats out of the 542. The Congress won 52 seats. Polling was countermanded in one seat in Tamil Nadu.
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The parties entering the House with just one seat each include the Aam Aadmi Party (Sangrur, Punjab), All Jharkhand Students Union Party (Giridih, Jharkhand), AIADMK (Theni, Tamil Nadu), All India United Democratic Front (Dhubri, Assam) and Revolutionary Socialist Party (Kollam, Kerala).
The others with one seat are VCK (Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu), Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (Sikkim), Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (Nagaland), Janata Dal-Secular (Hassan, Karnataka), Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (Nagaur, Rajasthan), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (Rajmahal, Jharkhand), Kerala Congress (M) (Kottayam, Kerala) and Mizo National Front (Mizoram).
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, out of the total 464 parties in the fray, 38 parties get entry into the Lok Sabha and 12 parties won only one seat each.
This time, six national parties -- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) -- collectively won 375 seats, up from 342 in 2014.
In 2014, 400 smaller parties got zero seats whose 6,040 candidates lost their security deposits. A candidate loses deposit if he fails to win even a sixth of the valid votes polled.
(Nivedita Singh can be contacted at nivedita.singh@ians.in)
--IANS
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