New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Geeta Koda, wife of former Jharkhand chief minister Madhu Koda, is trailing in Jharkhand’s tribal Singhbhum constituency by 1,15,915 votes, according to the Election Commission of India data as of 4.30 pm.
Standing against Geeta, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader and former state minister Joba Majhi is leading with 3,96,208 votes.
Geeta, Jharkhand’s lone Congress MP since the 2019 election, joined the BJP in February of this year. Contesting with a Congress ticket in the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, Geeta became Singhbhum’s first woman Member of Parliament after defeating Jharkhand BJP president Laxman Gilua by over 72,000 votes. While Geeta is running to retain the seat, the constituency has been known for changing its choices during the last few Lok Sabha elections.
Geeta’s husband, Madhu Koda, won the Singhbhum seat in 2009. Geeta took control of Madhu Koda’s Jai Bharat Samanta Party after the latter’s arrest in connection with a coal scam later that year. She then debuted from Jagannathpur and became the only one to win the assembly elections that year out of the nine candidates fielded by the party. In 2019, the party merged with the Congress, after which she fought for Singhbhum as a Congress candidate and won.
Meanwhile, Madhu was convicted in 2017 by a special CBI court in Delhi, which found him guilty of corruption and conspiracy in allocating a Jharkhand-based coal block to the Kolkata-based company Vini Iron and Steel Udyog Ltd (VISUL) and sentenced to a three-year jail term.
Hence, Geeta’s switch to the BJP led to her husband’s conviction being invoked once again in the campaigning in her constituency.
In April, Deepak Birua, a JMM minister in the Champai Soren government, called the BJP a “washing machine”, alleging that Geeta changed sides so that her husband “can be cleansed in the BJP’s washing machine”.
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