A total of 78 Muslim candidates contested the Indian Lok Sabha elections this time. 15 of them won the polls. Former Indian cricketer Yusuf Pathan is among the winning Muslim candidates.
The results of the Lok Sabha elections were announced on Tuesday after seven rounds of voting for about one and a half months. In the final result, BJP won 240 seats and Congress won 99 seats. BJP needed 32 more seats to get 272 seats required to form government alone. However, the BJP-led NDA alliance won 293 seats. The Congress-led India Alliance won 233 seats.
World Cup-winning former cricketer Yusuf Pathan has defeated Congress state president six-time MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury in Murshidabad’s Baharampur constituency in West Bengal. The margin of victory is 85 thousand votes.
Other Muslim candidates who won include Congress candidate Imran Masood. He won Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur constituency by a margin of more than 64,000 votes.
Samajwadi Party’s young leader Ikra Choudhury, 29, defeated BJP leader Pradeep Kumar by a margin of more than 69,000 votes in Uttar Pradesh’s Kairana constituency.
Samajwadi Party’s Muslim candidate Afzal Ansari won another seat in Gazipur in the same state.
AIMIM president Asaduddin Waisi retained his seat in Hyderabad. He defeated BJP’s Madhavi Lata Kampela.
Independent Muslim candidate Mohammad Hanafi in Ladakh and another independent Muslim candidate Abdul Rashid Sheikh in Baramulla constituency in Jammu and Kashmir won by 470,000 votes.
In Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party candidate Mohibullah won the Rampur seat by securing more than 481,000 votes. Ziaur Rehman won Sambhal seat.
National Conference candidate Mia Altaf Ahmad defeated former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti of Jammu and Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir is no longer a state, the state has been split into two separate Union Territories) in the Anantnag-Rajouri seat of Jammu and Kashmir. NC candidate Agha Syed Ruhullah Mehdi won in Srinagar.