 "BJP")
BJP's poll debutant Yogendra Chandoliya trounced Congress' Udit Raj by over 2.90 lakh votes in the North West Delhi Lok Sabha seat, registering the highest victory margin among the seven winning candidates of the party in the national capital.
In 2019, BJP's candidates won by margins ranging from over 2.28 lakh votes to 5.78 lakh votes.
But this time, three of the candidates, including late BJP leader Sushma Swaraj's daughter Bansuri Swaraj, won by a margin of less than a lakh votes while only Chandoliya breached the two-lakh mark.
Swaraj recorded the lowest victory margin among all the candidates. A first-timer, she was fielded by the BJP in place of outgoing MP and Union Minister Meenakshi Lekhi, and defeated AAP's Somnath Bharti by over 78,000 votes.
Lekhi won the seat twice in a row in 2014 and 2019 by margins of 2,56,504 and 1,62,708 votes respectively.
New Delhi is the smallest parliamentary constituency in the city in terms of the number of voters which is 15.25 lakh.
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Apart from New Delhi, seats of Chandni Chowk, and North East Delhi also generated a lot of interest because of the candidates in the fray.
Praveen Khandelwal won the Chandni Chowk seat by 89,325 votes. The odds against Khandelwal, a trader leader, were stacked up as he was pitted against Congress veteran JP Agarwal.
79-year-old Agarwal was a three-time former MP from Chandni Chowk.
Manoj Tiwari, the only sitting MP in Delhi repeated by the BJP, won from the North East Delhi constituency for the third time in a row defeating Congress's Kanhaiya Kumar by over 1.38 lakh votes.
The North East Delhi constituency, rocked by communal riots in 2020, was expected to have a close contest between Tiwari, a Bhojpuri film celebrity, and Kumar the firebrand former JNU students union president.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Tiwari defeated former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit by 3.66 lakh votes. Kumar managed to narrow down Tiwari's victory margin despite losing the contest.
BJP's Ramvir Singh Bidhuri won the South Delhi seat, defeating AAP's Sahi Ram Pahalwan by a margin of 1,24,333 votes.
In 2019, Ramesh Bidhuri won the seat by 3,67,043 votes defeating AAP's Raghav Chadha. In 2014, Ramesh Bidhuri had secured the seat by a margin of 1,07,000 votes.
AAP's Mahabal Mishra, a former MP, unsuccessfully contested the polls for a second time in a row as he lost to Kamaljeet Sehrawat, a poll debutant from the BJP. She won by a margin of over 1.99 lakh votes.
Parvesh Singh Varma had recorded the highest victory margin from the constituency in the 2019 polls by defeating Mishra by 5,78,486 votes.
In fact, it was the highest victory margin recorded in Delhi ever. Even in 2014, Varma had recorded the highest win margin among all the candidates by winning the seat by 2,68,586 votes.
Harsh Malhotra defeated AAP's Kuldeep Kumar to win the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat by a margin of 93,663 votes.
Malhotra, a first-timer, was fielded by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in place of outgoing MP and cricketer Gautam Gambhir, who had won the seat in 2019 by over 3,91,222 votes.
Gambhir had replaced Maheish Girri on the seat. Girri had won from the constituency in 2014 by 1,90,463 votes.
In 2019, singer Hans Raj Hans won the North West Delhi seat by over 5.53 lakh votes while in 2014, Udit Raj won on a BJP ticket by 1,06,802 votes.
Convener of Delhi BJP's poll management committee Ajay Mahawar said the winning margin did not decline as they were locked in a direct fight with INDIA bloc candidates.
"Our candidates have won with comfortable margins even as the opposition parties were claiming that they can not win in a straight one-to-one fight between us and the AAP-Congress alliance," he said.
The victory margin of BJP candidates in 2019 was higher because AAP and Congress were contesting separately. If you add their joint vote tally in 2019, the margins of BJP would be equal to what it is this time, Mahawar explained.
Talking about the underwhelming performance of the party in the national capital, AAP on Tuesday said despite adverse circumstances, their candidates gave a tough fight to the BJP in Delhi.
The victory margins were narrow and the people have voted against the saffron party's politics of "hatred and dictatorship, the party said.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
