Indore (Madhya Pradesh): On the eve of counting of votes in the Lok Sabha polls in Indore, the BJP on Monday said its victory margin would be a record high of 10 lakh whereas Congress, which was out of the fray as its candidate withdrew nomination, claimed NOTA would bag a massive two lakh votes.
The Congress had suffered a setback after its candidate Akshay Kanti Bam withdrew his nomination on April 29, leaving the grand old party (GoP) without a say in polling for the first time in the 72-year history of Indore.
Seeing a direct hand of BJP in this nomination withdrawal, an irked Congress had appealed to voters to press the None of the Above (NOTA) option on the EVM to "teach the BJP" a lesson.
Voting in Indore took place on May 13, with 61.75 per cent of 25.27 lakh electors exercising their franchise, as per Election Commission of India (ECI) data.
While 14 candidates were in the fray, the main battle was between BJP's sitting MP Shankar Lalwani and NOTA, as per observers.
'We are confident that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we will register the biggest victory ever in Indore by a margin of more than 10 lakh votes,' Lalwani said.
In the 2019 polls, he had defeated Congress' Pankaj Sanghvi by 5.48 lakh votes.
In 2019, Indore witnessed 69.31 per cent polling, with 5,045 voters opting for NOTA.
On the eve of counting of votes on Tuesday, senior Congress leader Shobha Oza said, 'This time NOTA will get at least two lakh votes in Indore. This national record will go down in history. It will be a lesson for political parties like BJP which strangle democracy.' NOTA was introduced in September 2013 following a Supreme Court decision.
Incidentally, the record for NOTA is 51,660 votes or around 5 per cent of the turnout, in Bihar's Gopalganj Lok Sabha seat in 2019.
As far as maximum victory margins are concerned, in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Gujarat BJP chief CR Patil won from Navsari by 6.90 lakh votes.
In the Lok Sabha by-poll held in October 2014, BJP's Pritam Munde had won from Beed in Maharashtra with a margin of 6.96 lakh votes. The by-poll was necessitated due to the death of BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde in a car accident.
