New Delhi: At least five candidates, including four from the BJP, crushed the previous record for the highest victory margin in the Lok Sabha elections, with Indore’s incumbent MP Shankar Lalwani of the BJP topping the list with a winning margin of 11.72 lakh votes.
The Congress’ Rakibul Hussain scored the second-highest victory margin with 10.12 lakh from Dhubri in Assam.
Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan won from Vidisha by 8.21 lakh votes — the third highest margin — followed by the BJP’s CR Patil, who recorded a margin of 7.73 lakh from Navsari in Gujarat.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah won from Gandhinagar by a margin of over 7.44 lakh votes.
The previous record for the highest winning margin was held by Pritam Munde, also from the BJP, who had won a bypoll in October 2014 from Beed in Maharashtra by more than 6.96 lakh votes.
Patil, a three-term MP from Navsari, held the record for the second-highest margin after he won by 6.89 lakh votes in 2019.
He has now broken his own record.
Union Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia won from Guna in Madhya Pradesh by more than 5.40 lakh votes.
Among other candidates who won by a margin of over 5 lakh votes are the BJP’s Gujarat candidates Rajpalsingh Jadav from Panchmahal (5.09 lakh) and Hemang Joshi from Vadodara (5.82 lakh), its Bhopal nominee Alok Sharma (5.01 lakh) and Sudheer Gupta from Mandsour (over 5 lakh).
The BJP’s Mahesh Sharma won from Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar by 5.59 lakh votes while the saffron party’s candidate from Raipur in Chattisgarh Brijmohan Agarwal secured a margin of 5.75 lakh.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi won by more than 1.52 lakh votes from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi bettered Sonia Gandhi’s 2019 victory margin from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, winning by more than 3.90 lakh votes.
Gandhi also won from Wayanad in Kerala by a margin of more than 3.64 lakh votes.
Former Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb of the BJP won from Tripura West by a margin of more than 6 lakh votes while Kriti Dev Debbarman of the saffron party won the Tripura East constituency by more than 4.86 lakh votes.
