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Journalism of Courage
The Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP’s) Durgesh Pathak is leading by 7,000 votes in Delhi’s Rajinder Nagar constituency, which voted in the bypoll on Thursday, after the end of eight out of 16 rounds of counting. BJP’s Rajesh Bhatia was second and Congress’s Prem Lata a distant third.
While AAP’s campaign centred around the work Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and the Delhi government had done in the past seven years, and making sure that Rajinder Nagar’s issues were resolved, BJP played the insider vs outsider card.
Pathak, who is originally from Gorakhpur, had contested the 2020 Assembly polls from North East Delhi’s Karawal Nagar. After a communally charged campaign, Pathak lost by a margin of over 8,000 votes. Throughout the campaign, BJP focussed on Pathak being an “outsider”. BJP’s Bhatia is a former councillor from the area. Congress, meanwhile, was mostly missing from the campaign on the ground.
According to the Election Commission website, after the end of seven rounds, AAP was leading with 17,491 votes, BJP was at 12,467, and Congress at 684 votes.
The voter turnout in the bypoll was a low 43.75% as opposed to 58.72% in 2020.
There were over 1.64 lakh registered voters in the constituency. Of these, 92,221 are male, 72,473 are female and 4 are categorised as ‘third gender’. A total of 1,899 voters between the ages of 18-19 were eligible to vote for the first time in the constituency.
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