“She said I am thankful to Amethi for showing their belief in development and helped bloom the lotus”.
BJP candidate Smriti Irani defeated Congress president Rahul Gandhi from his bastion of Amethi by a margin of over 55,000 votes, in a major setback for the grand old party.
According to the Election Commission website, Irani polled 4,68,514 votes while Gandhi secured 4,13,394 votes. The victory margin for Irani is 55,120 votes.
Irani has therefore emerged as a giant-killer - this time scripting a historic win by dethroning Rahul Gandhi in the Congress's home turf Amethi.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Gandhi had defeated Irani by 1,07,903 votes.
The 43-year-old popular television actor-turned politician continued to cultivate Amethi in the past five years despite her loss in 2014 to Gandhi and this helped her reap electoral dividends.
Throughout her campaigning, Irani asserted that people of Amethi want change and development and will vote for Modi. Irani courted quite often, be it her educational qualification or her stint in the Union Cabinet.
In her nomination papers, she mentioned she was not a graduate. She said she passed secondary school examination in 1991 and senior secondary school examination in 1993.
In her affidavit for the 2014 polls, she had said she graduated from Delhi University in 1994, triggering a row over the veracity of her claim, with opposition parties alleging she was not a graduate.
Irani became the youngest cabinet minister in 2014 after the BJP gained a massive victory in the Lok Sabha polls that year and was assigned the high-profile Human Resources Development (HRD) portfolio.
However, she was shifted out of HRD ministry to Textiles after a two-year tenure replete with controversies.