Election 2019: Ravi Shankar Prasad Wrests Patna Sahib From Shatrughan Sinha

Ravi Shankar Prasad of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won in Patna Sahib in Bihar with over 6 lakh votes, in the 2019 Lok Sabha election results on Thursday.

Prasad, the Union law minister, is contesting against actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha , who won the seat in 2014 and 2009 for the BJP. Sinha finished second with a little over half the votes Prasad received.

An outspoken critic of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi , Sinha had recently left the BJP for the Congress. In 2014, he had received over 55 percent of the votes in this constituency. 

Sinha recently said , “He is the prachar mantri, not pradhan mantri (he is the propaganda minister, not prime minister).”  

Prasad, a Supreme Court senior advocate, who served four terms in the Rajya Sabha, was contesting his first Lok Sabha election.

The News18-IPSOS exit poll predicted that Prasad would win Patna Sahib.

In 2014, the BJP had won 22 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar while its ally Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Jan Shakti Party and RLSP had won 6 and 3 seats respectively. The JD(U) was reduced to two seats and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to four seats.

IN 2019, BJP won nearly every seat while the Congress managed to win one.