Bollywood actor Sunny Deol won the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha seat of Punjab by 82,459 votes when votes were counted on Thursday. Deol was fielded by the Bharatiya Janata Party against incumbent MP Sunil Jakhar of the Congress. Jakhar got 4,76,260 votes, while Deol won 5,58,719 votes.
Their Aam Aadmi Party opponent Peter Masih won only 27,744 votes.
Gurdaspur used to be the constituency of another actor-turned-politician Vinod Khanna, who won the seat four times – in 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2014. He died in 2017, leaving the seat vacant. Jakhar had won the seat in the bye-poll that was held subsequently.
Vinod Khanna’s wife Kavita Khanna had earlier expressed her dismay over the BJP’s decision to field Deol from the constituency after purportedly promising to allot the seat to her.
Deol’s stepmother, actor Hema Malini, retained her Mathura constituency of Uttar Pradesh by a margin of 2,93,471 votes against mahagathbandhan candidate Kunwar Narendra Singh of the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will become the first leader to win the post with a simple majority twice in a row since 1971. By 7.30 am on Friday, the Election Commission of India has declared results in 511 of 542 constituencies. Modi’s BJP has won 290 of these. The party is ahead in 13 of the other constituencies where counting is still under way.
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