Raipur. Three women are also included among the 11 newly elected members of the Lok Sabha from Chhattisgarh. Three women had also won in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continued its excellent performance in the state and won 10 out of 11 Lok Sabha seats. Congress managed to get only one seat while in 2019 the party had won two seats. Out of the 11 MPs elected to the Lok Sabha, three are women, including two from BJP and one from Congress. BJP and Congress had fielded three women candidates each this time.
Two women candidates of BJP, Roopkumari Chaudhary and Kamlesh Jangde, won the election while sitting Congress MP Jyotsna Mahant managed to save her seat. BJP candidate Saroj Pandey (Korba) and Congress candidates Shashi Singh (Surguja) and Dr. Menaka Devi Singh (Raigarh) faced defeat. Former MLA Chaudhary defeated Congress candidate and former minister Tamradhwaj Sahu from Mahasamund seat by a margin of 1,45,456 votes. Chaudhary got 7,03,659 votes, while Sahu got 5,58,203 votes.
Similarly, Jangde defeated Shivkumar Dahria of the Congress, an influential leader of the Scheduled Caste community and a former minister, in the Janjgir-Champa (SC) seat. Jangde got 6,78,199 votes and Dahria got 6,18,199 votes. Dr Rohit Dahria of the Bahujan Samaj Party came third in Janjgir-Champa with 48,501 votes.
In another tribal-reserved Raigarh seat, Congress candidate Dr Maneka Devi Singh lost to BJP’s Radheshyam Rathia by a margin of 2,40,391 votes. Maneka belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Sarangarh. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, three women – Renuka Singh (Sarguja-ST) and Gomti Sai (Raigarh-ST) of the BJP and Jyotsna Mahant (Korba) of the Congress – emerged victorious. In the Chhattisgarh assembly elections held last year, 19 women were elected in the 90-member assembly. Of these, 11 are from the Congress and eight from the BJP.