New Delhi: In West Delhi's three-cornered fight, while Congress and AAP were busy putting up a fight against each other, BJP's Parvesh Verma took the cake, starting with a lead over other candidates the moment counting began. Verma, the incumbent MP won by the largest margin in Delhi surpassing his closest opponent by more than 5.78 lakh votes, finishing with a 60.05 percent vote share at the end of EVM and postal counting.
As soon as the counting started at 8 am on Thursday, the most exciting fight to watch was the one between Congress' Mahabal Mishra and Aam Aadmi Party's Balbir Singh Jakhar, which was a neck-to-neck contest until the 15th round of counting in the constituency. Both the Congress and AAP candidates were ensued in a back and forth battle with each getting the lead over the other at almost every round of counting. As a result, BJP's Verma comfortably maintained a vote share of above 59 percent throughout the counting period.
Eventually, Mishra overtook Jakhar and consistently maintained his position at second place with a vote share fluctuating between 19 percent range. By the end of the evening, Jakhar was nearly 40,000 votes behind Mishra and finished with a 17 percent vote share. Out of the 14.41 lakh votes polled, Verma received 8.65 lakh votes, while Mishra and Jakhar ended up with 2,87,162 and 2,51,873 votes respectively. Failing to reach the 10 percent vote share mark, all other 20 candidates had to give up their election deposits.
However, entering the Dwarka counting facility for West Delhi around 11 am, Verma had a sense of calm. By this time, he had left his closest opponent behind by more than 1 lakh votes and seemed as confident as a lion ready to tear into his kill. But according to Verma himself, trends of his large margin were a result of people's love for Narendra Modi. "People here have voted for a man like Modi to take the reins of the country's executive arm once again. This is a victory for Modi," he said.
Early trends throughout the day showed people from every single assembly constituency in West Delhi had voted for BJP in large numbers, from rural and agricultural areas in Najafgarh to trader and urban areas like Rajouri Garden. And the only reason that Verma won the seat could be attributed to the general feel on the ground that people were voting for the prime ministerial candidate and not the MP candidate.
The BJP's campaign in the Capital seemed to have been planned carefully to project their prime ministerial candidate more prominently than their MP candidates. And keeping their campaign drives focused on the leadership of the Modi government in the last five years has definitely paid off.