Lok Sabha elections: Ravi Kishan wins Gorakhpur seat by 3,01,664 votes
Gorakhpur (UP), Mar 23: BJP candidate and Bhojpuri actor Ravi Kishan on Thursday won the Gorakhpur seat by defeating his nearest rival Samajwadi Party candidate Rambhual Nishad. Kishan defeated Nishad by a margin of 3,01,664 votes, EC said here. Kishan polled 7,17122 votes, while Nishad got 4,15,458 votes.
Winning
Gorakhpur
had
become
a
matter
of
prestige
for
the
Bharatiya
Janata
Party
(BJP).
Once
considered
Yogi
Adityanath's
bastion,
the
BJP
lost
to
the
SP-BSP
alliance
in
the
2018
by-polls.
The
bye
poll
blow
came
after
the
BJP
tasted
the
back
to
back
successes
in
the
Uttar
Pradesh.
The
party
won
73
out
of
the
80
seats
in
2014
Lok
Sabha
elections
and
in
2017,
the
BJP
convincingly
won
the
assembly
elections.
['Prestige' seat Gorakhpur: Major hurdles for the BJP]
The constituency that Yogi Adityanath represented for five terms before vacating it in 2017 was wrested away from the BJP in a bypoll. Samajwadi Party's Praveen Kumar Nishad defeated BJP's Upendra Dutt Shukla by a margin of 21,881 votes in the by elections, dealing a blow to the BJP's prestige. The BJP is left no stone unturned to ensure that Gorakhpur is back in their kitty. With SP, BSP and RLD forming a magathbandhan, and Congress and BJP in the fray, Gorakhpur Lok Sabha constituency was set for a three-way contest.
This time, BJP had fielded actor-turned-politician Ravi Kishan from the constituency. He was up against Congress' Madhusudan Tiwari and SP's Ram Bhuwal Nishad.
PTI