B.S. Anand Singh, the disqualified MLA who contested as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate in Vijayanagar constituency, has won by an impressive margin of 30,125 votes over his immediate rival Venkatarao Ghorpade of the Congress.
As the counting of votes was completed at Government Polytechnic in Ballari on Monday, Sheik Tanveer Asif, returning officer, declared the result by 1.40 p.m. He then handed over the signed certificate to Madhusudhan Singh, a representative of Mr. Singh, and thanked all the poll staff.
Mr. Singh got 85,477 votes (55.51%) while Mr. Ghorpade got 55,352 (35.94%). Kaviraj Urs, an Independent candidate, stood third with 3,947 votes (2.56%) while Janata Dal (S) candidate M.N. Nabi came in fourth with 3,871 votes (2.51%). As many as 1,821 people opted for NOTA.
Mr. Singh opened his account with a margin of 1,510 votes in the first round and maintained the lead till the last round. Mr. Nabi, who was expected to eat up a considerable chunk of Muslim votes viewed as the Congress’ traditional vote bank, failed to make any difference.
Compared with the 2018 Assembly elections, Mr. Singh improved his performance in number of votes, vote share, and margin of victory. He had received 83,214 of the 1,66,130 votes polled (50.09%) in 2018. His victory margin then was 8,228 votes.
It was Mr. Singh who took the lead in resigning from the Legislative Assembly and set the trend for more resignations and defections, which eventually led to the collapse of the Congress-JD(S) coalition government.
