Gurugram: Former Haryana Chief Minister and BJP leader Manohar Lal Khattar is leading from the Karnal Lok Sabha seat over his nearest rival, Divyanshu Budhiraja of the Congress, by a margin of 2 lakh votes, according to results from the Election Commission at 3 pm Tuesday.
Khattar resigned from the post of Haryana CM on 12 March this year, following a change of guard in the state government implemented by the party’s central leadership.
The next day, he resigned as MLA from the Karnal assembly seat, and the BJP named him as its candidate for the Karnal Lok Sabha constituency, denying a ticket to sitting MP Sanjay Bhatia, who had won the seat for the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections by a record margin of 6.56 lakh votes.
A former RSS pracharak, Khattar became Haryana CM after the October 2014 assembly elections. He was said to be close to Narendra Modi when the latter was the BJP’s general secretary in charge of Haryana before becoming the Gujarat CM in October 2001.
In the October 2019 assembly elections, Khattar returned to power in alliance with the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) after the BJP won 40 seats in the 90-member assembly while Dushyant Chautala’s JJP secured 10 seats.
On 12 March this year, Nayab Singh Saini replaced him as Haryana CM after Khattar had completed almost nine-and-a-half years in power.
In 17 elections for the Karnal Lok Sabha seat since Independence, the BJP has won on four occasions. It won the seat riding on the Modi wave in 2014 and 2019, and before that I.D. Swami won the seat for the BJP in 1996 and 1999.
Senior BJP leader the late Sushma Swaraj had contested the Karnal seat thrice in 1980, 1984, and 1989, but every time Chiranji Lal Sharma of the Congress defeated her.
In 2014, Ashwini Chopra, editor and owner of Punjab Kesari, Delhi, defeated Arvind Sharma of the Congress by a margin of over 3.6 lakh votes.
In 2019, Sanjay Bhatia, a close aide of Khattar, won the Karnal seat by a record margin of 6.56 lakh votes, the second-highest victory margin in the country in that election after BJP leader C.R. Patil’s 6.89 lakh margin win in Gujarat’s Navsari Lok Sabha seat.
However, despite his win by the second-highest margin in 2019, Bhatia lost his ticket to Khattar this poll season.
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