92 Congress, 38 AAP nominees lose deposits in Delhi civic polls

As many as 38 of the 270 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidates and 92 of the Congress forfeited their security deposits in the Delhi civic polls, State Election Commissioner (SEC) S.K. Srivastava disclosed on Wednesday.

Only five Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidates lost their deposits this time round. In 2012, 18 BJP contestants had lost their deposits, while the figure for the Congress was 26.

The security deposit is forfeited if a candidate fails to garner a minimum of 1/6th of the total number of valid votes.

In all, 1,790 candidates of the total 2,516 candidates in the fray lost their deposits in Sunday's municipal polls, votes for which were counted on Wednesday, the SEC said.

In all the three municipal corporations, the BJP candidates won by the highest margins. BJP's Sanjeev Kapoor left the AAP's Naveen Gupta behind by 9,332 votes in Krishna Nagar (East DMC) seat.

In Dwarka-B (South DMC) ward, BJP's Kamaljeet Sehrawat defeated the AAP's Sushma Bansal by 9,866 votes.

In Saraswati Vihar (NDMC), Neeraj Kumar of the BJP defeated the AAP's Desraj Aggarwal by 7,895 votes.

Anita Tanwar of the BJP won by two votes in Chattarpur (SDMC), while Gurjeet Kaur of the same party won by 58 seats in Bhajanpura (EDMC).

Seema Tahira of the Congress won by 259 votes from Bazar Sita Ram (North DMC).

Interestingly, as many as 49,235 voters opted for NOTA this time around, which worked out to 0.67 per cent of the total votes cast. Of these, 10,283 (0.58 per cent) were recorded in EDMC, 19,762 (0.74 per cent) in NDMC and 19,190 (0.71 per cent) in SDMC.

"This is quite a high number of NOTA. This means the voters were not happy with any of the candidates in the fray and they expressed their displeasure through NOTA," Srivastava observed.

--IANS

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