NOTA makes record by winning two lakhs votes in Indore
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Indore: The ruling BJP declared on Monday that it would win by a record margin of 10 lakh votes in the Lok Sabha poll in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Meanwhile, the opposition Congress, which was eliminated from the race when its candidate withdrew, asserted that NOTA (None of the Above) would receive two lakh votes.
On April 29, the Congress suffered a setback after its candidate Akshay Kanti Bam withdrew his nomination, leaving the grand old party without a say in polling for the first time in the 72-year history of Indore.
The Congress, which called this a "strangling of democracy", had been appealing to voters since then to press the NOTA option on the EVM to "teach the Bharatiya Janata Party" a lesson. Voting in Indore took place on May 13, with 61.75 per cent of the 25.27 lakh electors exercising their franchise, as per Election Commission of India data.
While 14 candidates were in the fray, the main battle was between BJP's sitting MP Shankar Lalwani and NOTA, as per observers. "We are confident that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we will register the biggest victory ever in Indore by a margin of more than 10 lakh votes," Lalwani told PTI. In the 2019 polls, he had defeated the Congress' Pankaj Sanghvi by 5.48 lakh votes.
In 2019, Indore witnessed 69.31 per cent polling, with 5,045 voters opting for NOTA. On the eve of counting of votes on Tuesday, senior Congress leader Shobha Oza said, "This time NOTA will get at least two lakh votes in Indore. This national record will go down in history. It will be a lesson for political parties like BJP which strangle democracy."
NOTA was introduced in September 2013 following a Supreme Court decision. Incidentally, the record for NOTA is 51,660 votes, or around 5 per cent of the turnout, in Bihar's Gopalganj Lok Sabha seat in 2019. As far the maximum victory margins are concerned, in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Gujarat BJP chief CR Paatil won from Navsari by 6.90 lakh votes.
In the Lok Sabha bypoll held in October 2014, BJP's Pritam Munde had won from Beed in Maharashtra with a margin of 6.96 lakh votes. The bypoll was necessitated due to the death of BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde in a car accident.
Source: PTI