The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were announced on 04 June 2024. The BJP managed to win 240 seats, becoming the single largest party in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP-led NDA coalition secured 293 seats and is set to form the government. In this context, several posts (here, here, here, here, & here) claiming that the BJP won 30 seats with a margin of less than 500 votes and over 100 seats with less than 1000 votes in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections are being widely shared across social media platforms. Through this article, let’s fact-check the claims made in these posts.
Claim: The BJP won 30 seats with a margin of less than 500 votes and over 100 seats with a margin of less than 1000 votes in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Fact: The lowest victory margin for a BJP candidate in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is 1,587 votes. BJP’s Rabindra Narayan Behera from Odisha’s Jajpur constituency, who received 5,34,239 votes, defeated BJD’s Sarmistha Sethi, who secured 5,32,652 votes, by a margin of 1,587 votes. Among the 240 BJP candidates who won in the 2024 general elections, only 8 secured victories with a margin of less than 10,000 votes, and only 14 BJP candidates secured victory with a margin of less than 20,000 votes. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To verify the veracity of the viral claim, we visited the Election Commission of India website and examined the 2024 Lok Sabha election results. The results are also available party-wise on the Election Commission of India’s website, including the victory margins for each candidate. After analyzing the results of all 543 parliamentary constituencies, we noticed that Shiv Sena’s Ravindra Dattaram Waikar won the Mumbai North West constituency with the lowest margin of 48 votes. Waikar received a total of 4,52,644 votes, while the trailing candidate, Amol Gajanan Kirtikar from Shiv Sena (UBT), secured 4,52,596 votes.
Among the 240 BJP candidates who won in the 2024 general elections, we found that the lowest victory margin for a BJP candidate was 1,587 votes. BJP’s Rabindra Narayan Behera from Odisha’s Jajpur constituency, who received 5,34,239 votes, defeated BJD’s Sarmistha Sethi, who secured 5,32,652 votes, by a margin of 1,587 votes.
The second lowest victory margin for a BJP candidate in the Lok Sabha election was 1,615 votes. BJP’s Rao Rajendra Singh from Rajasthan’s Jaipur Rural constituency, who received 6,17,877 votes, defeated INC’s Anil Chopra, who secured 6,16,262 votes, by a margin of 1,615 votes.
Overall, only 8 BJP candidates won with a margin of less than 10,000 votes and 14 BJP candidates secured victory with a margin of less than 20,000 votes. Further, only 7 BJP candidates won with a margin of less than 5,000 votes. The narrowest margin by which a BJP candidate won in the 2024 Lok Sabha Polls was 1,587 votes.
A list of candidates, sorted in ascending order of their margin of victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, can be seen in the below table. Comprehensive results of General Election to Lok Sabha- 2024 can be found in this dataset.
Sabyasachi Das was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. In 2023, he released a research paper titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy.” According to reports (here & here), Sabyasachi suggested in this paper that the BJP may have won closely contested seats in the 2019 general elections by manipulation. The release of this paper caused a significant uproar and Ashoka University distanced itself from the paper. Subsequently, Sabyasachi resigned, and the university accepted his resignation.
To sum up, the lowest margin by which a BJP candidate won in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls is 1,587 votes, and only 14 BJP candidates secured victory with a margin of less than 20,000 votes.
