Patna, May 23: Fiery young politician Kanhaiya Kumar is trailing BJP leader Giriraj Singh in Begusarai constituency in Bihar, according to leads at 10.46 am. The former student leader from Jawaharlal Nehru University is contesting on a CPI ticket and is making his Lok Sabha election debut.
One of 36 Lok Sabha seats in the state, Begusarai voted on April 23 in the fourth phase of polling. For years known as the "Leningrad of Bihar", it is now a BJP stronghold.
The seat was won by Bhola Singh of the BJP in 2014. He defeated Rashtriya Janta Dal candidate Tanveer Hasan who received 3,69,892 votes. The CPI placed third in that election.
Kanhaiya Kumar's campaign drew much attention, not just for his oratorical skills but because of high-profile supporters like Swara Bhaskar, Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar endorsing him in rallies.
The ruling BJP's candidate Giriraj Singh, notorious for asking critics of the government to "go to Pakistan", pitched the Begusarai vote as a "nationalist versus traitor" battle - a reference to allegations that Kanhaiya Kumar was among the organisers of an event in JNU in 2016 in the memory of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, where anti-India slogans were raised.
The counting of votes polled for the 17th Lok Sabha elections began at 8 am today with the fate of as many as 8,040 candidates at stake.
The 2019 elections, which spanned six weeks registered the highest ever voter turnout in the history of Indian parliamentary elections. The final voter turnout stands at 67.11 per cent, the Election Commission announced on Wednesday.
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