B'desh pitch fails to help BJP in tribal belt

The Jharkhand electoral contest was expected to be closer than the final outcome showed, with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulling out all the stops on its Hindutva pitch during a high-octane campaign centred around alleged infiltration by Bangladeshis and corruption charges against chief minister Hemant Soren.

- Vishal Kant

As the BJP strategy did not seem to have worked, an eerie silence gripped the party's state headquarters by Saturday afternoon as the trends pouring in pointed towards a huge lead for the incumbent. The BJP was the lead partner in the alliance with the AJSU, JDU and LJP-R and contested 68 of the 81 seats. The AJSU contested 10 seats, the JDU two and the LJP-R one. The AJSU, the JDU and the LJP-R won one seat each.

The BJP managed to win 21 seats, four down from 2019. Of the 25 seats the BJP won in 2019, the party could retain just 10, with some big names including leader of the opposition Amar Kumar Bauri, chief whip Biranchi Narayan and four-term legislator Neelkanth Singh Munda losing.