Election Results 2019: Tejasvi Surya retains BJP bastion in Bangalore South

Bengaluru, May 23: Tejasvi Surya, the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) youngest candidate, won from the Bangalore South constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as votes were being counted on Thursday.

The 28-year-old lawyer was ahead of the Congress' B K Hariprasad by almost 1 lakh votes.

Surya, the nephew of BJP lawmaker Ravi Subramanya, is the youngest candidate to have been fielded by the saffron party. He is known for his polarising speeches and is closely associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the BJP. Surya has said that he is unapologetic about this association as it played a great role in shaping him.

The Bangalore South seat has been considered a 'safe seat' for the BJP, as its voters had sent Union minister Ananth Kumar to the Lok Sabha six times.

After his death last year, it was widely expected that his wife Tejaswini Ananth Kumar would be given the party's ticket from the constituency. After Surya's candidature was announced, many of Tejaswini Ananth Kumar's supporters staged a protest in Bengaluru.

The choice of Surya came as a surprise to many, including, it seems, the candidate himself, who posted a series of tweets that began with "OMG OMG!!! I can't believe this", after the news broke.

Surya, the general secretary of the BJP's youth wing in Karnataka and part of its national social media campaign team for 2019, also got a lot of attention for many divisive, communal tweets that Twitter users dug out from his timeline.