Hazaribagh: BJP's Manish Jaiswal won from Hazaribagh Lok Sabha constituency, a BJP stronghold by a margin of 2.7 lakh votes. As per the Election Commission data, Manish Jaiswal has secured 6,54,613 votes while Congress's Jai Prakash Bhai Patel, got 3,77,927 votes. A total of 17 candidates were in the fray here.
The vote share of the saffron party jumped from a little over 42 percent in 2014 to over 67 percent in 2019, the ruling party faces a predicament after having issued a show cause notice to sitting party MP Jayant Sinha ahead of the Lok Sabha election 2024.
The notice came after Sinha was benched for the Lok Sabha seat and replaced by party candidate Manish Jaiswal. The BJP on May 20 issued a show cause notice to Sinha for not taking part in campaigning after Manish Jaiswal was declared candidate from the Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat and thereby "maligning" the party's image. Hours before the announcement that Jaiswal would be the candidate for Hazaribagh, Sinha had requested party leadership to relieve him from electoral politics.
The absence of the sitting BJP MP from the electoral fray coupled with the INDIA bloc announcing the candidature of BJP turncoat and Congress leader Jai Prakash Bhai Patel for the seat makes Hazaribagh a seat to watch out for.
2024 Polls: The total number of registered voters in this constituency in 2024 polls was 1918769, and the seat saw a voting turnout of 64.39%, according to the Election Commission’s data. The seat went to polls in phase 5 on May 20, 2024.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Jayant Sinha won the Hazaribagh by a mammoth margin of 479548 against his nearest rival Gopal Prasad Sahu of the Congress. While Sinha secured 728798 votes, Sahu polled 249250 votes. In the 2014 LS polls too, Jayant Sinha had won the seat opposite Congress's Saurabh Narain Singh by a margin of over 1,59,000 votes.
