Guwahati: All incumbent Lok Sabha MPs from Assam had won the 2014 general election although more than half of the registered voters in their respective constituencies had not voted for them, said Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), an election watch organisation, in its report on Sunday.
While the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF)’s Barpeta MP Siraj Uddin Ajmal won the last election even when some 72% of the voters of the constituency did not vote for him, Sarbananda Sonowal won from the Lakhimpur seat with 57% voters choosing not to vote for him. The report said, “Out of 1,430,175 voters in Barpeta, at least 1,035,473 did not vote for Ajmal. He only got 394,702 votes; whereas his contender from BJP Chandra Mohan Patowary lost to him with a margin of over 42,000 votes.”
Sonowal had got 612,543 votes in the last Lok Sabha election out of 1,430,994 total voters in the Lakhimpur constituency. Later in 2016, he became the chief minister of the state and Pradan Baruah succeeded him.
Former chief minister Tarun Gogoi’s son and Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi won from the Kaliabor Lok Sabha constituency in 2014 with 443,315 voters in his favour. In Kaliabor, there were at least 1,457,865 voters in the last election. Gogoi is fighting from Kaliabor once again this time. “Congress’s sitting MP from Silchar Sushmita Dev, who has been offered the party ticket to fight again, had got 336,451 votes in her favour out of a total of 1,060,175 voters in the constituency,” the report added.
Former Ulfa rebel leader Naba Kumar Sarania, who won as an independent candidate from the Kokrajhar parliamentary seat, had received 634,428 votes in his favour out of 1,505,476 total voters. Sarania is fighting this election again. Besides, the ruling BJP’s five MPs—Rajen Gohain, Bijoya Chakraborty, Kamakhya Prasad Tasa, Ramen Deka and RP Sharma—who were denied party tickets this time had won the last Lok Sabha polls with less than 40% of voters in their respective constituencies casting votes in their favour.
The ADR report added that in 2014, some 38 lakh registered voters in the state did not vote.
