Banka (Bihar) Election 2019: RJD MP Jai Prakash Yadav seeks second Lok Sabha term

Patna: The 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar were held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. The Banka Lok Sabha constituency went to polls in the second phase on April 19, together with Kishanganj, Katihar, Purnia and Bhagalpur seats in Bihar. Banka saw a tough poll battle between Jai Prakash Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Girdhari Lal Yadav of the Janata Dal (United).

 
The Banka Lok Sabha seat comprises six state Assembly segments of Sultanganj, Amarpur, Dhoraiya, Banka, Katoria and Belhar. Out of these, Dhoraiya and Katoria seats are reserved for the candidates belonging to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories respectively.
 
In 2014 general elections, Banka recorded a voter turnout of 58.04 per cent. Jai Prakash Yadav of the RJD secured 2,85,150 (31.71 per cent) votes. Yadav, who won the poll with the margin of 10,144 votes, defeated Putul Kumari of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Banka was one of the few Parliamentary constituencies in the Hindi belt won by the RJD despite the Modi-wave in 2014.
 
Under the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) seat sharing calculation, Banka went into the JD(U)’s kitty, resulting in the denial of ticket to Putul Kumari in 2019. Putul Kumari had won this seat in 2010 byelection that was necessitated by the death of her husband and sitting MP Digvijaya Singh. She defeated RJD’s Jai Prakash Yadav in the byelection.

The counting of votes will take place on May 23.