As the country awaits the result of the World’s biggest democratic exercise, News18-IPSOS, an exit poll survey by Network 18, gives an insight into the probable outcome of the results.
News18-IPSOS suggests that BJP candidate and cricketer-turned-politician Gautam Gambhir may emerge as a winner from East Delhi seat of Delhi. He is in a tripolar contest with Congress’s Arvinder Singh Lovely and AAP’s Atishi.
Lovely is a former president of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee and a four-time MLA from Gandhi Nagar. He has also been the Minister for Urban Development and Revenue, Education, Transport, Tourism, Languages, Gurdwara election, Local Bodies and Gurdwara Administration in the Sheila Dikshit government of Delhi. He briefly joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on 18 April 2017 as a result of certain differences within the Delhi State Congress. He was convinced to re-join the Congress on February 17 2018.
Atishi has served as an advisor to the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi, Manish Sisodia, primarily on education, from July 2015 to 17 April 2018. She was sacked by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs for holding an unapproved designation.
Earlier in 2014, BJP had won all the seven constituencies of Delhi including the East Delhi seat with a margin of 15.9 per cent votes. BJP candidate Mahesh Giri gathered 5,72,202 votes (47.8 per cent) defeating AAP’s Rajmohan Gandhi who had got 3,81,739 votes (31.9 per cent). Sandeep Dixit, senior Congress leader and son of former chief minister Dixit was at the third position with 17 per cent votes.
In 2004 and 2009, Congress's Sandeep had emerged victorious. In 2004, Sandeep had defeated BJP’s Lal Bihari Tiwari with a huge margin of 19.3 per cent votes. Dixit and Tiwari got 56.2 per cent and 36.9 per cent vote share, respectively.
Congress had won six seats while BJP could manage to grab only one seat of South Delhi in the 2004 polls.
In 2009 elections, Congress had swept all seven seats of Delhi when Sandeep won the East Delhi seat with a huge margin of 28.1 per cent. Sandeep with 60.4 per cent votes defeated BJP’s Chetan Chauhan, who received 32.3 per cent votes.
The Lok Sabha elections in 2019 took place in seven phases across India in the time span of about a month and a half. A total of 543 seats went to polls in which around 900 million voters were expected to exercise their voting right.
The final results will be announced on May 23.