Kathmandu, March 7 -- Govinda Panthi of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) has won the Gulmi-2 seat with 16,967 votes, defeating CPN-UML's Gokarna Bista by 561 votes.

Bista received 16,406 votes. Nepali Congress candidate Bhuwan Prasad Shrestha secured 14,434 votes, while Nepali Communist Party candidate Shreeram Mahat got 3,081 votes.

Bista, who is also UML vice-chair, had been contesting from this constituency since 1999 and won all elections except the 2008 constituent assembly polls, when he lost to then CPN-Maoist candidate Chandra Bahadur Thapa.

In previous elections, he defeated Congress candidates by margins ranging from over 2,200 votes in 1999 to over 14,000 in 2017.

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