Bihar Lok Sabha Election Results 2024: With Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U) putting on a stronger-than-anticipated performance, the ruling NDA appears to set hold onto power in the state, with its candidates leading in 34 of the total 40 Lok Sabha seats.
With Nitish Kumar’s JD (U) becoming the largest party in the state, the party is leading on 14 seats, as per trends on the Election Commission’s website by 4.30pm the Bihar CM is likely to play the kingmaker to claim the throne at the Centre.
If the trends were translated into results, the outcome would be a strong rebuff to those who felt the longest-serving CM was the "weak link" in the NDA.
The BJP, which had kept for itself the lion's share of 17 seats, was leading in 13 of these, with Union ministers RK Singh and Nityanand Rai among the trailing candidates.
Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) appeared to have struck gold with all five candidates, including its president Chirag Paswan, leading in respective seats by comfortable margins.
Former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, who heads the Hindustani Awam Morcha, won the Gaya Lok Sabha seat. Similarily, LJP’s Chirag Paswan clinched the Hajipur constituency by a huge vote margin of 1.5 lakh votes.
The RJD, one of the partners in the INDIA alliance and the largest party in the assembly for ten years, was putting up again another poor showing in legislative polls.
It was leading in three seats, including Patliputra, where party chief Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharti had built a sizable lead over BJP MP Ram Kripal Yadav, in contrast to the 2019 elections, when it was drawing a blank.
In Saran, Rohini Acharya, the younger sister of Bharti, was lagging Rajiv Pratap Rudy, the BJP veteran, by a narrow margin of almost 15,000 votes.
After contesting nine seats, the Congress was leading in two of them, namely the reserved seat of Sasaram and the Muslim-majority Kishanganj, which it had been winning consistently since 2009.
In two of the three seats it fought, the CPI(ML) Liberation was starting to look like the electoral equivalent of the proverbial dark horse.
Raja Ram Kushwaha led in Karakat by more than fifty thousand votes, while Sudama Prasad led Union minister RK Singh by more than thirty thousand in Arrah.
Upendra Kushwaha, the president of Rashtriya Lok Morcha and a former Union minister, was trailing the Left party candidate in the 2014 election. Pawan Singh, the popular Bhojpuri actor, ran as an Independent and finished well behind.
