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Journalism of Courage
The Delhi Assembly results on Saturday revealed that the BJP won nine of the 13 close contests, where the victory margin was less than 5,000 votes while the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won the remaining four.
The closest victory for the BJP came in Sangam Vihar, where its candidate Chandan Kumar Choudhary defeated the AAP’s sitting MLA Dinesh Mohaniya by 344 votes. Here, the Congress’s candidate Harsh Choudhary finished third with 15,863 votes. Interestingly, NOTA too polled more votes – 537 – than the victory margin.
In Trilokpuri, the BJP’s Ravi Kant won against the AAP’s Anjana Parcha with a margin of 392 votes while the Congress’s Amardeep polled 6,147 votes to finish third. The Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) and the BSP, which garnered 1,681 and 1,322 votes respectively, also polled more votes than the victory margin here.
The Congress seemed to have played spoilsport for AAP bigwig and ex-Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, who lost to the BJP’s Tarvinder Singh Marwah by 675 votes while the Congress’ Farhad Suri finished third with 7,350 votes.
Another prominent AAP face and former minister Saurabh Bhardwaj lost the Greater Kailash seat to BJP candidate Shikha Roy by 3,188 votes while Garvit Singhvi of the Congress polled almost double the victory margin.
In Mehrauli, the BJP defeated the AAP by 1,782 votes while Independent candidate Balyogi Baba Balaknath finished third with 9,731 votes. The Congress candidate, who finished fourth here, garnered 9,338 votes, higher than the victory margin.
The AAP’s biggest setback came from the New Delhi seat, where its chief Arvind Kejriwal lost to Parvesh Verma of the BJP by 4,089 votes while the Congress’ Sandeep Dikshit polled 4,568 votes.
Malviya Nagar and Rajinder Nagar also saw close contests where the BJP candidates got the better of their AAP rivals by 2,131 and 1,231 votes respectively.
On the other hand, the AAP retained four seats – Delhi Cantt, Kalkaji, Ambedkar Nagar and Patel Nagar – with a less than 5,000 victory margin.
In Delhi Cantt, AAP candidate Virender Singh Kadiyan won with a margin of 2,029 votes while CM Atishi retained the Kalkaji seat with a margin of just over 3,500 votes.
In Ambedkar Nagar, the AAP’s Ajay Dutt won by 4,230 votes while in Patel Nagar, the incumbent party’s victory margin stood at 4,654 votes.
In 2020, the AAP had won seven seats with margins less than 5,000 but this time, lost all those seats to the BJP, which managed to retain one of its two low-margin seats.
