- Thursday, March 13, 2025
The Indian PM has won from the holy city by overwhelming margins both in the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections. He will file his 2024 nomination on May 14.
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN prime minister Narendra Modi on Monday (13) evening held a massive roadshow in the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh which is also his parliamentary constituency.
He was ser to file his nomination from the seat on Tuesday (14). Varanasi will go to polling on June 1, when the final of the seven phases of the ongoing general elections in India takes place.
Before embarking on the roadshow which was attended by several thousands of people, Modi paid tributes to social reformer and educationist Madan Mohan Malviya in Varanasi, which is known to be a holy city for the Hindus.
Modi was accompanied by Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh who is also considered to be one of the rising stars of the prime minister’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Reports said Modi was also set to take a holy dip in the River Ganges during his rally.
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Modi would stay in a guest house in the city on Monday night. His convoy is set to touch upon a number of prominent points in the city.
Sources in the BJP said people from different communities — including Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marwari, Tamil and Punjabi, among others, will welcome the PM at 100 points in 11 zones in the city during the roadshow. He will also seek blessings of Baba Vishwanath, they added.
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He was welcomed by the supporters with blowing of conches and beats of instruments such as dhol and damru.
Modi contested his first-ever parliamentary election in 2014 in Varanasi and won it by a mammoth margin of more than 371,000 votes over his nearest rival Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party. The BJP leader had also contested the general election that year from Vadodara in his home state of Gujarat which he won by a margin of more than 570,000 votes. He later vacated that seat and retained Varanasi.
In 2019, Modi won in the constituency by an even bigger margin of 479,000 against his nearest candidate Shalini Yadav of the Samajwadi Party.
This year, he will be challenged once again by Ajay Rai, the chief of the opposition Indian National Congress, who had stood against him in the previous two polls as well to end up third.
(With PTI inputs)
