The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Champai Soren was leading in Jharkhand’s Seraikela constituency by over 19,000 votes as of 4.40 pm on Saturday, as votes for the state Assembly election were being counted.
The former chief minister has served five terms as the MLA from Seraikela. He had secured 1,08,673 of the total votes counted on Saturday afternoon.
The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s Ganesh Mahali trailed Champai Soren by 19,852 votes.
Champai Soren had quit the state’s ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha on August 28 and joined the BJP two days later.
He claimed at the time that only the Hindutva party was serious about the problem of “infiltrators from Bangladesh” in parts of Jharkhand.
While the BJP has persistently made claims about undocumented Muslim immigrants grabbing land in Jharkhand, a Scroll investigation found no evidence for the claim.
The 67-year-old had also said that he felt insulted by the manner in which the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha asked him to step down as the chief minister in July, after 152 days in office, to make way for party leader Hemant Soren to return to the post.
Champai Soren had taken over as Jharkhand’s chief minister on February 2. This came after Hemant Soren resigned from the post on January 31, hours before his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate in a money-laundering case.
After the Jharkhand High Court granted Hemant Soren bail on June 28, Champai Soren resigned as the chief minister on July 3.