Over 60% of turncoat candidates fielded by BJP lost in Lok Sabha polls

New Delhi, NT Bureau: Nearly 62% 'turncoat' candidates fielded by the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) lost the Lok Sabha elections on Tuesday.

The Lok Sabha results showed the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance(NDA) winning the polls, but with a significantly reduced margin. The BJP was not able to cross the halfway mark of 272 on its own.

The party fielded 110 candidates who switched to the BJP after Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. Of them, 68 lost the Lok Sabha election, an analysis by The Print showed. The highest number of turncoats who joined the BJP were from the Congress.

At least 38 candidates who joined the BJP after 2014 came from the Opposition party. However, the poll results show that more than 20 of these candidates lost the elections. In Uttar Pradesh, 12 of 22 turncoats fielded by the BJP lost. 

The state has the highest number of Lok Sabha seats at 80. In Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, all eight turncoats fielded by the BJP lost the polls.

However, in Odisha, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, all the turncoat candidates fielded by the party won the polls. This year, the BJP fielded 34 candidates who had been with the party for only two years or less.

Of these 34 candidates, 27 lost the polls. Some of the prominent turncoat candidates fielded by the BJP who lost the polls were former Congress leaders Jyoti Mirdha from Rajasthan’s Nagaur, Anil Antony from Kerala’s Pathanamthitta, Ravneet Singh Bittu from Punjab’s Ludhiana, Preneet Kaur from Patiala, Arvind Kumar Sharma from Haryana’s Rohtak. 

Aam Aadmi Party’s lone Lok Sabha candidate Sushil Kumar Rinku, who had left the party and joined the BJP in March, also lost the polls from Punjab’s Jalandhar.