In Indian polls, 6,451 people have been elected as members of the Lok Sabha since 1962. The dream of every candidate is to get a landslide victory, that is, win by a wide margin. But how many of them managed to do so?

Most popular faces

Data shows that in the past, there were MPs who won the election with more than 90 per cent vote share in their respective constituencies. However, not all of them have had a strong opponent to contest against. For instance, PL Handoo of Jammu & Kashmir National Conference won the elections in 1989 from Anantnag, with close to 98 per cent vote share. However, data from IndiaVotes, an election database shows that Handoo didn’t have to face any major opponents, barring a few independent candidates. The same applies to most MPs, who have the highest vote share ever in Indian history.

The person to have won with the seventh highest vote share in history is former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, who fought the 1991 bypolls from Nandyal. He won the elections with an 89.5 per cent vote share, against a BJP candidate and five independents.

Lok Janshakti Party founder and former minister Ram Vilas Paswan follows Rao. Paswan was first elected to Parliament in 1977 as a member of the Bharatiya Lok Dal, from Hajipur in Bihar, and won with an 89 per cent vote share. This was right after the emergency, and he fought against Congress veteran Baleshwar Ram and six independent candidates then.

Seven-time wonder

Paswan was elected as an MP with a majority vote share for a total of seven times. He was elected the last in 2014.

Four politicians, apart from Paswan, were elected more than seven times as the popular candidate in their constituency. One of them is CPM’s Anil Basu, who was elected multiple times from West Bengal’s Arambagh constituency. During his last parliamentary election in 2004, Basu emerged victorious by a margin of 5.92 lakh votes, which was the highest-ever victory margin in LS polls in the country until 2014.

Former Home Minister Buta Singh, too, was elected seven times with a majority vote share. While he was elected as an Akali Dal MP during his first election, he contested all other winning elections as a member of the Indian National Congress. He was last elected in 1999. In 2014, he fought the polls as an independent candidate backed by the Samajwadi Party. However, he was defeated at that time by BJP’s Devji Patel.

Former Union Minister Harin Patel has also won the elections with a majority vote share seven times. A BJP member, he was last elected in 2009.

Communist Party of India (CPI) leader and former Home Minister Indrajit Gupta is the other person on the list. He was last elected to Parliament in 1999 and remained a parliamentarian until he died in 2001. Gupta was an MP for close to four decades and was conferred with the ‘Outstanding Parliamentarian’ Award in 1992. 

The credit for being the most favoured candidate, or to win with more than 50 per cent of the total votes in their constituency goes to 3,350 MPs, according to the analysis of data put out by Ashoka University’s Lokdhaba portal.

While a whopping 1,441 of these MPs were members of the Congress at that time, 556 were BJP members. The data also shows that 259 of them were members of the erstwhile Bharatiya Lok Dal party, which existed between 1974 and 1977. Then comes the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, with 122 and 114 members, respectively, who emerged as the most popular candidate in the constituency.

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