17th Lok Sabha results, Bihar: Tariq Anwar loses Katihar, LJP wins Samastipur seat

Katihar/Samastipur/Araria: Former Union minister and senior Congress leader Tariq Anwar Thursday loses his Katihar Lok Sabha seat to JD(U)s Dulal Chandra Goswami by a margin of about 57,000 votes.

In Samastipur Lok Sabha seat, Lok Janshakti Party candidate Ramchandra Paswan defeated Ashok Kumar of the Congress by over 1.5 lakh votes.

At Araria, BJP's Pradeep Kumar Singh trounced RJD's Sarfaraz Alam.

Anwar had won the Katihar seat, fighting on an NCP ticket, in 2014 when he defeated three-term BJP MP Nikhil Kumar Chaudhary by more than one lakh votes.

Anwar, who returned to the Congress last year after a gap of nearly three decades, had represented the seat four times in the 1980s and 1990s before he severed his ties with the party and floated the NCP along with Maharashtra stalwart Sharad Pawar and Meghalaya leader PA Sangma.

At Samastipur, LJP president Ramvilas Paswan's younger brother Ramchandra Paswan retained his seat defeating Ashok Kumar of the Congress by over 1.5 lakh votes.

Paswan had won the reserved seat five years ago when he had beaten Kumar by a much smaller margin of about 10,000 votes.

The BJP wrested back Araria Lok Sabha seat from RJDs Sarfaraz Alam who was defeated by Pradeep Kumar Singh by a margin of 1.37 lakh votes.

Singh had won the seat in 2009 but lost it to Alams late father Mohd Taslimuddin by about 1.5 lakh votes in 2014. Upon the death of Taslimuddin, who yielded tremendous influence in the parliamentary segment with a sizeable population of Muslims, Singh flunked in the by-poll which he lost by a reduced margin of less than 60,000 votes.

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