In two tribal seats, NOTA bigger than winning margin

RANCHI: At Lohardaga and Khunti constituencies — both ST reserved seats that saw the tightest contests in the state —

NOTA

got more votes that the margin by which the winning candidates secured their victory.


In Khunti, where BJP’s former chief minister Arjun Munda defeated Congress’s Kalicharan Munda by 1,445 votes, 21,245 people opted to press the NOTA button. The trend continued in Lohardaga, too, where 10,783 voters opted for NOTA, 420 votes more than the

winning margin

(10,363) by which sitting BJP MP Sudarshan Bhagat defeated Congress’s Sukhdeo Bhagat.

The overall percentage of NOTA votes cast has dropped in almost every seat in Jharkhand, including the five ST seats, in comparison to 2014 elections, the share of NOTA votes increased in Chatra, Giridih, Godda and Koderma. Out of these four, Koderma and Giridih have registered the maximum increase in the share of NOTA share. In both these seats the NDA chose to bench the sitting MPs to field new faces — RJD turncoat Annapurna Devi in Koderma and Ajsu-P’s Chandra Prakash Choudhary in Giridh.

“Voters tends to opt for NOTA in scenarios where the parties and the candidates in the fray do not live up to their expectations. This was reflected in Khunti and Lohardaga seats where NOTA polled more votes than the winning margin,” said Sudhir Pal, the state coordinator of National Election Watch (NEW), a nationwide campaign on electoral reforms.

While Koderma registered an increase of 1.93% in NOTA votes as against the percentage in 2014, the jump in Giridih was 1.28%.

Talking about these two seats, Pal said, “For many party loyalists, the replacement of a stalwart face to introduce new candidates didn’t go down well and the increase in the number of NOTA votes is an indication of that mood.”

A quick look at the numbers of 2014 verdict reveal that the highest NOTA votes were polled in Singhbhum, where 27,037 voters opted out of casting their votes in favour of any candidate, closely followed by 23,816 NOTA votes cast in Khunti.

This year, in Dumka, 11 out of the 15 candidates in fray in the reserved ST seat lost to NOTA, although the percentage of NOTA votes reduced from 2.03% in 2014 to 1.4% in 2019. Another ST seat, Rajmahal saw a similar trend where the precentage of NOTA votes dropped from 2.08% in 2014 to 1.23% in 2019.