No, BJP Didn't Win 165 Seats in UP With Margin of Less Than 2000 Votes

These numbers do not corroborate with the official numbers published on ECI's website.

Fact-check: A false claim about the BJP winning some seats in UP with a risky margin is going viral with incorrect numbers.

(Photo: The Quint)

A post is going viral on social media platforms which claims that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 165 seats in Uttar Pradesh during the 2024 Lok Sabha election with a victory margin of less than 2,000 votes.

It states, "The situation could have been much worse than it panned out for the BJP. BJP won 7 seats with difference of 200 votes. BJP won 23 seats with difference of 500 votes. BJP won 49 seats with difference of 1000 votes. BJP won 86 seats with difference of 2000 votes. That's a total of 165 seats with a difference of 2000 or fewer votes. The power could do easily have gone to the Indi Alliance. Scary" (sic)

An archive of the post can be found here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

(Archives of similar claims can be seen here and here.)

What's the truth?: We found out that this claim is false.

• We checked the margins of seats won by BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and lowest victory margin was not below 1587 votes.

How did we find out the truth?: We checked the official website of Election Commission of India (ECI) to compare the original numbers with the ones mentioned in the viral claim.

Firstly, Uttar Pradesh elects 80 of 543 Lok Sabha seats, here is a breakdown of seats won by each party where SP scored the maximum.

• We then checked data shared by ECI about total seats won by the BJP and also the margin by which these seats were won.

• We noticed that no seat with BJP's win had a margin of less than 200, 500 or 1,000 seats, as claimed.

• The lowest margin in this data was 1,587 and this was from Jajpur (Odisha).

There were only three other seats where the BJP secured the narrowest victory margins below 2000 votes and these were:

• Jajpur (Odisha) - 1,587 votes

• Jaipur Rural (Rajasthan) - 1,615

• Kanker (Chhattisgarh) - 1,884

Here are the screenshots from the ECI website:

Seats won by BJP in Jajpur, Odisha.

(Source: ECI/Screenshot)

Seats won by BJP in Jaipur Rural, Rajasthan.

(Source: ECI/Screenshot)

Seats won by BJP in Kanker, Chhattisgarh.

(Source: ECI/Screenshot)

The same message went viral in 2022 after Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections and you can read our fact-check here.

Conclusion: Clearly, a false claim about the BJP winning some seats in UP with a small margin is going viral with incorrect numbers.

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