india

Updated: Dec 19, 2018 18:30 IST

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday swept the Haryana Mayoral elections in five municipal councils in the state.

The Congress did not field any of its own candidates in the elections, opting instead to support independent candidates.

In Yamunanagar Municipal Corporation, Madan Singh was elected as the Mayor with a margin of 40,678 votes. Chauhan had polled a total of 91,462 votes as against his closest competitor Congress-supported Rakesh Sharma who won 50,964 votes.

In Hisar, BJP’s Gautam Sardana won by a margin of 28,091 votes. In Panipat, BJP’s Avneet emerged the winner with a margin of 74,940 votes, the highest margin of votes between the winner and the second runner up in these elections. In Karnal, chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s home town, BJP’s Renu Bala won with a margin of 9,348 votes, the lowest margin in these elections. In Rohtak, BJP candidate Man Mohan won with a margin of 14,776 votes.

State Election Commissioner Dalip Singh stated that the overall percentage in these elections remained 69.39 per cent. Also, 62.7 per cent voting was seen in the Municipal Corporation Hisar, 61.8 per cent in Karnal, 62 per cent in Panipat, 62.4 per cent in Rohtak and 65.2 per cent in Yamunanagar.

Apart from the elections for the five mayors, two ward councillors for Jakhal Mandi in Fatehabad and Pundri in Kaithal district were also elected. Jakhal Mandi recorded 89.5 per cent, while it was 82.1 per cent in Pundri town.

Reacting to the victories in all five councils, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar congratulated the winners on twitter and attributed the victory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “transparent policies” and BJP president Amit Shah’s “illustrious leadership”.

THE NOTA FACTOR

These elections saw two changes in policy by the Haryana Election Commission. First, it decided to get the mayors elected directly, instead of going through the councillors. And second, the Haryana EC decided to treat the NOTA (None of the Above) option as a “fictional candidate” in the municipal elections. This meant that the winning candidate would have to get more votes than those polled for NOTA. This was for the first time that NOTA had an actual significance in the electoral history of the country, giving voters the right to reject all the candidates.

Earlier, a candidate would still be declared a winner if he got lesser votes than NOTA. But this time, the Haryana Election Commission had announced that it would hold elections again if NOTA got more votes than the candidates. In the re-elections, the candidates who got lesser votes than NOTA would not have been allowed to file a nomination, the commission announced.

NOTA polled a total of 7549 votes across the five councils. In Panipat, NOTA won 3008 votes. With 701 votes in Hisar, NOTA was ahead of 13 of the total 22 candidates who had contested the election.

Similarly, the option garnered 1068 votes in Rohtak, which was more than the vote count of five of the 12 candidates, 1746 votes in Yamunanagar and 1032 votes in Karnal.