New Delhi: BJP candidate and former Indian cricketer Gautam Gambhir registered a comfortable win and swept the triangular election at East Delhi Constituency in style after defeating its rivals from Congress and AAP. However, looking closely at the margin of victory it seems it was never a triangular contest.
Gambhir got 696156 votes as compared to his nearest rival Arvinder Singh Lovely of Congress who got 304934 votes. Atishi, who was considered to be AAP best bet in the election scored just 219328 votes. Interestingly the margin of Gambhir is such that even if the votes of AAP and Congress are combined, Gambhir would have registered a comfortable win. Gambhir has secured 55.33% votes, compared to Arvinder who got 24.2% of the votes, while Atishi was third with 17.4% of the votes. Also 4907 votes were cast on NOTA.
Just after the decisive lead former teammate, Harbhajan Singh congratulated Gambhir via twitter beside several others. Gambhir said that it is the ideology of BJP which people have supported. Taking a jibe at Congress candidate Arvinder Singh Lovely and AAP's Atishi, he said "Neither the 'Lovely' cover drive or Atishi 'ballebaazi' was supported by people. I thank the voters of East Delhi and also the workers of BJP for their support".
The east Delhi seat has nearly 16 lakhs votes of which over 12 lakhs cast their votes. East Delhi is considered to be BJP's stronghold.
In 2014, the BJP's Mahesh Girri won from here with 5,72,202 votes. However, the party decided to field former cricketer Gautam Gambhir in place of Giri.