 "Bastion breached, new leaders emerge: 10 Lok Sabha seats that matter")
Khadoor Sahib
In a multi-cornered contest, Khadoor Sahib’s fifth candidate, Amritpal Singh, the head of Warish Punjab De, contested as an Independent while lodged in a jail in Assam. The radical Sikh preacher is popular in the constituency for his campaign against drug menace and his supporters detest any comparisons with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. However, Amritpal’s win would New Delhi sit up and take notice.
Chhindwara
The BJP was set to lose a seat in Gujarat, a first in two Lok Sabha elections, but won Chhindwara in MP, a seat it has never won despite its increasing influence over the years in Madhya Pradesh. Nakul Nath won the seat in 2019, the only one of the 29 that the BJP lost in the state, which his father, Kamal Nath, had first won in 1980 and represented it until 2014 barring a couple of occasions. The BJP has finally won all 29 seats.
Hassan
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A Vokkaliga stronghold, Hassan has been with the Janata Dal (Secular) for three decades, sending former prime minister
H D Deve Gowda to the Lok Sabha on five occasions since 1991 and his grandson Prajwal Revanna in 2019. The Deve Gowda family’s ancestral village is located in Holenarsipur in Hassan, an Assembly seat the former PM won for the first time in 1962 and Prajwal’s father, HD Revanna, has represented six times since 1994. However, in 2024, with Prajwal facing charges of sexual harassment of women, the Deve Gowda family was set to lose its hold on Hassan.
Bangalore (Rural)
A seat held by D K Suresh, the brother of D K Shivakumar, the deputy chief minister of Karnataka, since 2013 has now gone into the hands of the H D Deve Gowda family, which rivals Shivakumar for the Vokkaliga support. The BJP, as part of its alliance with the Janata Dal (Secular), fielded CN Manjunath, a surgeon and Deve Gowda’s son-in-law, on the BJP ticket from Bangalore Rural. The BJP has held sway on Bangalore’s urban seats for three decades but struggled to win the Bangalore Rural seat until now.
Thrissur
The BJP’s first win in Kerala has come with actor-turned-politician Suresh Gopi winning the Thrissur seat. However, the BJP couldn’t secure the Thiruvananthapuram seat with Congress’ Shashi Tharoor eking out a win.
Baharampur
Congress’ Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the party’s leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha, and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s bitter critic, was trailing against cricketer-turned-politician Yusuf Pathan by over 80,000 votes in his Baharampur stronghold. Banerjee had identified Chowdhury as the biggest hurdle in her potential seat adjustment with the Congress in Bengal. Chowdhury is a five-term MP from Baharampur, winning successively since 1999.
Varanasi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was leading on the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat over the INDIA bloc candidate, Congress’ Ajay Rai, by over 150,000 votes and set to secure a third successive win. However, his margin of win has reduced substantially from the 479,505 that he secured in a three-cornered contest in 2019, and was symptomatic of the losses that the BJP and its allies suffered across the Purvanchal region of Uttar Pradesh, especially the seats that polled in Phase-VII, such as Robertsganj, Chandauli, Ghazipur, and others.
Nagina
Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram)’s Chandrashekhar Azad won the seat by over 150,000 votes. At a time when the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a fading force, and the Jatavas looking for a successor to former UP chief minister Mayawati,
Chandrashekhar winning the seat could lead to a churn in the Dalit politics in UP.
Amethi
Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra stationed herself in Amethi for 10 days to campaign for family loyalist and Congress worker Kishori Lal, who the Congress fielded against BJP’s Smriti Irani, a Union minister, who defeated former Congress president Rahul Gandhi in 2019. Lal was leading Irani by over 160,000 votes.
Faizabad (Ayodhya)
The Samajwadi Party fielded Awadhesh Prasad, a Dalit, from a ‘general’ seat against the BJP’s sitting Lok Sabha member Lallu Singh, to reach out to Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Castes of the area, which had become the centrepiece of the BJP’s Hindutva push with the consecration of the idol at the Ram temple in Ayodhya on January 22. The BJP’s defeat in Ayodhya marked the triumph of Mandal over Kamandal in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.