JAIPUR: It was a marginal difference in vote shares of the Congress and BJP that sealed the fate of outgoing CM Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan BJP secured a voteshare of 38.8% while Congress, which with 99 seats emerged the single-largest party, took 39.3% of votes polled — a difference of a mere 0.5%. A total of 1.39 crore votes went to Congress while BJP bagged 1.37 crore votes. That works out to a difference of about 1.70 lakh votes.Interestingly, the none-ofthe-above or Nota option accounted for 1.3% of the votes. These figures all go to show how much of a close fight it was between the two major parties in the state.BJP, which swept the 2013 assembly polls with a voteshare of 46.05% and 163 of the 200 seats, saw a 7.25% dip in voteshare this time. Its tally in 2018 was down to 73. Congress, in 2013, secured a 33.71% voteshare and had 21 seats to show for it.Even if it were to be believed that BJP lost 5.6% of its voteshare to Congress, the remaining 1.65% may be put down to Nota — which is conventionally seen as a voteagainst the ruling party -- the more than 15 rebels who contested as Independents and smaller parties.Coming to terms with the near miss, state BJP leaders are now claiming a moral victory for the party. “Congress has performed only slightly better than BJP. There was no Congress wave. Even the victory margins for several Congress MLAs have been quite low,” said state BJP leader Jyoti Kiran.