Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat by a massive 4.79 lakh votes. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah won the Gandhinagar seat by an even fatter margin of 5.57 lakh votes.
Their victory numbers, however, pale in front of those managed by C.R. Patil, the BJP candidate from South Gujarat’s Navsari constituency. Patil, a two-time MP from Navsari, won a third term Thursday beating the Congress’ Dharmeshbhai Patel by 6.9 lakh votes.
Patel’s victory is the highest winning margin in this Lok Sabha election.
The BJP candidate improved on his 2014 performance when he had won the constituency by 5.58 lakh votes.
Patil’s victory margin nearly beat the highest ever in Indian electoral history. That distinction is still with the BJP’s Pritam Munde, who won her father Gopinath Munde’s bastion of Beed, by a margin of 6.96 lakh votes in the bypoll after his death in 2014.
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A former police constable, now a staunch Modi supporter
Patil, who hails from Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district, joined the BJP in 1989 and has served as a local functionary on several posts. He is now in charge of the party’s Bihar unit.
Navsari has a significant Marathi-speaking population and Patil’s Maharashtra roots make him a popular leader in the constituency. Patil was also one of the richest candidates this Lok Sabha election with assets worth Rs 74.47 crore.
Ahead of the Lok Sabha election, Patil was among the handful of BJP leaders entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing development works in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency of Varanasi, canvassing among people there and laying the land for poll preparations.
According to the Ahmedabad Mirror, Patil stayed in Varanasi between 24 April and 17 May. Varanasi voted in the last phase of the seven-phase Lok Sabha election.
The Modi man has courted several controversies too.
Before entering politics, he was a former constable with the Gujarat Police and was suspended for allegedly being involved in the illegal liquor trade.
In 2002, Patil was arrested in the multi-crore Diamond Jubilee Cooperative Bank scam. The leader had defaulted on a loan worth Rs 54 lakh, which led to the bank’s collapse.
He also spent time behind bars for defaulting on a payment to the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation. Patil had leased land for a period of 90 years on a part downpayment but defaulted on further payments. He eventually cleared the dues with interest.
Gujarat — the state of decisive BJP mandates
Patil’s win is the epitome of the huge victory margins that the BJP has managed in Gujarat, where the party has swept all 26 seats.
Fifteen of the BJP victors triumphed with margins of over 3 lakh votes. Besides Patil and Shah, two other MPs won by over 5 lakh votes — Ranjanben Bhatt, who trounced Congress’ Prashant Patel by 5.89 lakh votes in Vadodara, and Darshana Jardosh, who crushed Congress’ Ashok Patel by 5.48 lakh votes in Surat.
Even the lowest victory margin in the state was by over a lakh. This was at the Dahod constituency where the Congress was leading in the initial rounds but the BJP’s Jaswantsinh Bhabhor eventually won by 1.27 lakh votes.
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Like how Shekhar Gupta, Rajdeep Sardesai, Shagarika Ghosh, Burkha Butt, Rana are all staunch supporters of Congress…as theyve been fed by Pappu and family over the years
Alls fair in love and war
Vivek Oberoi could play him in a biopic.