Six out of eight vanquished MLAs trailed in own assembly segments

Ranchi: As many as 12 incumbent MLAs of the current Jharkhand Vidhan Sabha contested in the recently concluded election to the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state but only four of them tasted victory while eight were vanquished to the extent that six of the candidates even “lost” in their respective assembly segments.The winning MLAs are JMM’s Nalin Soren (Shikharipara MLA) and Joba Majhi (Manoharpur MLA), BJP’s Manish Jaiswal (Hazaribag sadar MLA) and Dulu Mahato (Baghmara MLA).Among the eight losers are BJP’s Sita Murmu (Jama MLA), Congress’s Pradeep Yadav (Poreyahat MLA), the party’s Mandu MLA, Jai Prakash Bhai Patel, JMM’s Samir Mohanty (Baharagora MLA) and Mathura Prasad Mahato (Tundi MLA). The remaining three JMM rebels Lobin Hembrom (Borio MLA) and Chamra Linda (Bishunpur MLA), and JMM CPI-ML-L’s legislator from Bagodar, Vinod Kumar Singh.In the fight for Jamshedpur parliamentary constituency, JMM’s Samir Mohanty lost to BJP’s Bidyut Baran Mahto, who got nearly 30,000 more votes than Mohanty in the latter’s own assembly constituency.Similarly, Mandu MLA Jai Prakash Bhai Patel got 32,068 votes less than his nearest BJP rival in the assembly segment. Patel switched to Congress from BJP on March 20 and contested the Hazaribag seat against his former party colleague Manish Jaiswal, who is also the sitting MLA from the Hazaribag sadar assembly segment.On a similar note, JMM’s rebel Borio MLA Lobin Hembrom, who was expelled by the party for contesting as independent from the Rajmahal (ST) seat, could not get a lead against his opponent Vijay Kumar Hansdak (of JMM) in his own assembly constituency. The 77-year-old MLA, whose future has become uncertain after his revolt, could manage to garner only 14,133 votes while Hansdak got a whopping 77,537 votes from Borio.Another rebel, JMM’s Bishunpur (ST) MLA Chamra Linda, who contested the Lohardaga (ST) Lok Sabha seat as an independent, fetched only 13,276 votes on his home turf and trailed behind Congress candidate Sukhdeo Bhagat by 64,619 votes.Congress candidate Pradeep Yadav, too, trailed in his backyard Poreyahat under the Godda parliamentary constituency behind BJP’s Nishikant Dubey by 8,540 votes. In Koderma, CPI-ML-L’s Vinod Kumar Singh also trailed BJP’s Annapurna Devi by 59,251 votes in his own assembly segment of Bagodar in Giridih. The left candidate, however, claimed that it was the tectonic shift of the Vaishya community’s votes in his own constituency that made him lag behind.He added, “That apart, only the core voters of the INDIA bloc parties voted for me and we failed to get other votes, including those of the general caste who traditionally vote for them (BJP). This has been the general trend of all the parliamentary constituencies in the North Chotanagpur division (Hazaribag, Dhanbad, Koderma and Giridih) during this election. That is why BJP won the chunk of its seats from here in 2019 and in the state assembly election that year as well.”Talking to TOI on Thursday, Congress’s losing candidate from Jamshedpur, Patel, said he did not get much time to campaign. “I had less than a month and a half, and could not visit most places in the constituency. In politics, if you do not show up for 10 days, the people tend to forget you,” he claimed. Yadav and Hembrom declined to comment on their losses when contacted and claimed they were yet to analyse their performances.The only exceptions were Sita Murmu (BJP) and Nalin Soren (JMM), who gained leads over each other in their respective assembly segments of Jama and Shikaripara assembly segments under the Dumka (ST) constituency. In Dhanbad, BJP’s Dulu Mahto is an MLA from Baghmara, an assembly segment not under the Dhanbad Lok Sabha constituency but Giridih. In the Giridih parliamentary seat, BJP’s ally Ajsu-P put up its candidate Chandrapakash Chaudhary and JMM’s losing candidate Mathura Prasad Mahto maintained a thin lead of 943 votes in his backyard of the Tundi Assembly segment over his Ajsu-P opponent.
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