The counting of votes in the Jharkhand Assembly Elections are currently underway. The elections are being contested extremely hard and the face of results is changing after every round of counting. Only a short time ago, there were 27 seats where the margin between the leading candidate and his or her closest rival is less than 2000 votes. Of these 27 seats, the BJP was leading in 8 and trailing in 13.
In seats like Baghmara, Bishrampur, Jamshedpur East and Jharia, the BJP had won comfortably last time around with the margin of victory as huge as nearly 70,000 in Jamshedpur East and well over 33,000 in Jharia. In Baghmara s well, the margin of victory for the BJP was nearly 30,000 and in Bishrampur, it was nearly 14,000. In seats like Gandey and Giridih, the BJP’s margin of victory was around the 10,000 mark.
Interestingly enough, in Silli, where the JMM had won the last time around with a margin of victory of almost 30,000 votes, it was trailing there against the AJSU. Similarly, in Gomia, where the JMM had won comfortably the last time around with a margin exceeding 37,000 votes, it was struggling to hold on to that seat although it is leading there currently.
Panki is the only seat among these where the incumbent was a Congress candidate and there, the BJP was leading. There were 5 seats among these where the JVM had won the last time but among these 5, the JVM was leading only in one at the moment and that is Simaria.
Now, there are 21 such seats where the margin is less than 2500 votes. The BJP is trailing in 10 of those and leading in 7. The seats marked purple are those where the margin is less than 1500 votes.
The leads are likely to change again after the next round of counting. As per the latest ECI trends, the BJP is leading in 31 seats while the alliance is at 40, just one short of a majority. Thus, while the alliance is much better placed, the election is far from over. It will go right down to the wire.
Update
Most of the seats with close margins mentioned in this report went to the JMM+ alliance. Apart from Bishrampur, Chattarpur, Dhanbad, Kodarma, Mandu, Sarath and Simaria, the BJP failed to win any of the seats as mentioned in the last trends. Only in Sarath was the party leading. In the other six, it came from behind to win rather comfortably in most of them. In seats like Dumri and Gandey, it surrendered leads. In the end, the BJP was restricted to only 25 seats in the Jharkhand Assembly.
