Bihar rejects four of six turncoats, rebel takes cake in Purnia

Patna: It seems the people of Bihar rejected most of the turncoats in the Lok Sabha elections, the results of which were declared on Tuesday, even as a rebel turned out to be one of the biggest winners from Purnia constituency. Of at least six candidates who switched parties just ahead of the elections – including four after being denied tickets from their parties – only two won their respectiv seats.While maximum three candidates left chief minister Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) for Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), two quit Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for Congress and RJD each, and one switched over to JD(U) from RJD.The winners among the turncoats were Lovely Anand, the wife of former MP and don-turned-politician Anand Mohan, from Sheohar, and Abhay Kumar Sinha, from Aurangabad, while former MP Rajesh Ranjan, alias Pappu Yadav, who fought the election as an Independent candidate from Purnia despite merging his Jan Adhikar Party (Loktantrik)party with the Congress defeated a JD(U) turncoat.Lovely dumped the RJD and joined the ruling JD(U) in March, hours before the BJP agreed to sacrifice its Sheohar constituency for chief minister Kumar’s party as part of the seat-sharing deal of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the state. Lovely won with 4,76,612 votes, defeating RJD’s Ritu Jaiswal by 29,143 votes.In 2019 general elections, the seat was won by the BJP’s Rama Devi with 6,06,581 votes, constituting 60.6% of the vote share, by beating Syed Faisal Ali of the RJD.Sinha, who exited the JD(U) to join RJD in March, won from Aurangabad with 4,65,567 votes, defeating BJP’s Sushil Kumar Singh by a margin of 79,111 votes.Among the four other turncoats, two lost, while two were trailing behind till the last reports were filed.The worst performers among them is former Bihar minister and five-time MLA Bima Bharti (51) who joined the RJD after leaving JD(U) in March. She finished a distant third at Purnia Lok Sabha seat, polling just 27,120 votes, as Pappu Yadav took the cake winning the constituency with 5,67,556 votes. Sitting MP Santosh Kumar of JD(U) gave a close fight, losing by just 23,847 votes. In 2019, Santosh had won with 6,32,924 votes.Bharti had switched over to the RJD after JD(U) fielded Santosh as the party candidate, while her nomination made Pappu Yadav jump into the Purnia fray as an Independent candidate. This time, the seat went to the RJD under the seat-sharing arrangement of the opposition INDIA bloc.Deepak Yadav (46), who quit the BJP to join RJD in April after being denied a ticket from the Valmiki Nagar seat, also lost the same to JD(U)’s Sunil Kumar by 98,675 votes. His nomination had made news as RJD neta Tejashwi Yadav had announced Deepak’s candidature from Valmiki Nagar soon after inducting him into the party.Apart from them, Md Ali Ashraf Fatmi — who switched over from the JD(U) to RJD in March — was lost by over 1.5 lakh votes at Madhubani constituency where BJP’s Ashok Kumar Yadav won with 5,53,428 votes.The former JD(U) national general secretary had resigned from the party a day after Darbhanga Lok Sabha seat, which he won four times, went to the BJP as part of the seat-sharing deal of the NDA. Fatmi had claimed CM Kumar’s recent realignment with the BJP left him in a state of “shock”.Besides, Ajay Nishad – who had won the Muzaffarpur seat in 2019 on a BJP ticket, but joined the Congress in April, also lost by over 2.34 lakh votes at the constituency behind the saffron party’s Raj Bhushan Choudhary. Nishad had resigned from the BJP after the party replaced the two-time MP with Choudhary who won with over 6.19 lakh votes.