Except for winners and runners-up, all lose deposit

Pradeep Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 24

The Lok Sabha elections in Haryana proved to be a two-legged race between the BJP and Congress with 203 candidates of all other political parties losing their security deposit.

In fact, all other candidates except the winner and runner-up lost their security deposit, indicating that the main contest was between the saffron party and the Congress.

However, in the Hisar Lok Sabha seat, Dushyant Chautala of the JJP-AAP alliance was placed second, resulting in Bhavya Bishnoi (Congress) losing his security deposit.

Under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, a candidate has to poll one-sixth of the total valid votes to not lose the security deposit, Joint Chief Electoral Officer Inderjeet said.

A maximum of 27 candidates lost the security deposit in Sonepat while a minimum of 14 candidates lost it in Karnal. The number of such candidates at different seats was Ambala (16), Bhiwani-Mahendragarh (19), Gurugram (22), Sirsa (18), Kurukshetra (22), Faridabad (25), Hisar (24) and Rohtak (16).

Prominent among those who lost the security included Arjun Chautala from INLD (Kurukshetra), Digvijay Chautala from JJP-AAP (Sonepat), Naveen Jaihind from JJP-AAP (Faridabad) and Charanjit Rori from INLD (Sirsa).

Meanwhile, Haryana recorded 41,781 NOTA votes. That came out to be 0.33 per cent of the total votes polled. The maximum of 7,943 NOTA votes were cast in Ambala and the minimum of 2,041 in Bhiwani-Mahendragarh.

Aam Aadmi Party barely ‘defeats’ NOTA

The three candidates of the AAP barely managed to defeat NOTA in Haryana. They managed to poll only 45,284 votes as against 41,781 NOTA votes. In fact, AAP state president Naveen Jaihind, who was the alliance candidate from Faridabad, got the dubious distinction of securing minimum votes (10,982) among AAP candidates.