Himachal polls: Battles that went down to the last vote

Shimla (Himachal Pradesh) [India], December 9 (ANI): As the result of Himachal Pradesh Assembly polls declared on Thursday, several candidates of Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party recorded victories by narrow margins.
In Bhoranj, Congress candidate Suresh Kumar won by just 60 votes. Suresh Kumar got 24,779 votes while BJP’s Anil Dhiman got 24,719 votes. In Bilaspur, BJP’s Trilok Jamwal won by a margin of only 267 votes. BJP’s Randhir Sharma won Sri Naina Deviji constituency by 171 votes.
In Sujanpur constituency, Congress Rajinder Singh won by 399 votes.
In Shillai constituency, Congress’ Harshwardhan Chauhan defeated BJP candidate Baldev Singh by only 382 votes.
Congress candidate Nand Lal won by 567 votes in Rampur, defeating BJP’s Kaul Singh.
In Darang constituency, BJP candidate Puran Chand defeated Congress’ Kaul Singh by 618 votes.
Congress candidate Kuldeep Singh Pathania defeated BJP’s Vikram Singh by 1,567 votes. BJP candidate Inder Singh managed to win Balh constituency by a margin of 1,307 votes. BJP candidateBikram Singh won Jaswan-Pragpur seat by 1,789 votes.
Congress candidate Ravi Thakur won Lahaul and Spiti seat by a margin of 1,616 votes. In Nahan, Congress’ Ajay Solanki won by 1,639 votes.
Confirming that all votes had been counted, the Election Commission on Thursday late evening said that Congress bagged a total of 40 seats in the Assembly, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) finished at 25 seats.
The Independents won three seats while the AAP failed to open its account in the state.

In terms of vote share in Himachal, Congress was only marginally ahead of the BJP with 43.88 per cent of votes. The BJP finished a close second bagging 42.99 per cent of the total votes polled.
The rest garnered a 10.4 per cent vote share in the hill-state.
The poll victory for the Congress was the latest instance of Himachal living up to its time-honoured tradition of not voting back the incumbent. (ANI)