Nearly three months after overdue elections were held on the Supreme Court’s order for the Bihar bar council on 27 March, the vote counting is now complete and has confirmed the 25 winning members, including the re-election of senior counsel and ex-Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra.

The Times of India reported that results were declared on Friday, with the following 25 members making the cut:

Senior advocates:

• Manan Kumar Mishra,
• Rajendra Prasad Singh,
• Yogesh Chandra Verma,
• Ramakant Sharma (re-elected),
• Vindhya Kesri Kumar,

High court-based advocates

• Shashi Shekhar Kishore,
• Prem Kumar Jha,
• Pankaj Kumar,
• Neetu Jha
• Jitendra Narayan Singh

From Patna city civil court:

• Jai Prakash Singh,
• Shahnaz Fatma

From other Bihar courts:

• Prem Nath Ojha from Muzaffarpur,
• Sachidanand Singh from Muzaffarpur,
• Arun Kumar Singh from Sitamarhi,
• Dharmnath Prasad Yadav from Chhapra,
• Rajeeva Kumar Dwivedi from Motihari,
• Sudama Roy from Ara,
• Ranjan Kumar Jha from Banka,
• Rajeev Sharan from Purnia,
• Kameshwar Pandey from Bhagalpur.
• Dinanath Yadav from Madhubani,
• Mahammad Saidullah from Bettiah,
• Ram Charitra Prasad from Munger and
• Murari Kumar Himanshu from Gaya.

According to the Times, 243 advocates had contested the elections.

The count

A Facebook post with the final tally (see below), stated that 38,920 valid votes were cast, out of more than 65,000 advocates eligible for voting in the state, according to a TOI article from March.

Mishra, along with Prem Nath Ojha, Rajendra Prasad Singh, Yogesh Cahndra Verma, Sachidanand Singh, Ramakant Sharma, Jai Prakash Singh and Shashi Shekhar Kishore all tallied 149,693 points, under a system where each vote was worth 100 points.

To win, each candidate would have to poll at least 1,497 votes, with any first preference votes above that being discarded with the second preference votes then accruing to the next candidate.

Contrasting with Bihar’s 3-month-long vote count, the albeit smaller geographical area of Delhi that had polled nearly as many advocates at 28,672, concluded its count in less than two weeks, by 12 April 2018.

Bar councils of Jharkhand, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, West Bengal and Rajasthan were also ordered by the Supreme Court to hold elections in March.

The BCI and state bar councils had managed to delay elections for years after members’ terms had expired for more than two years in the case of Bihar and others, until the Supreme Court intervened.

Fresh polls had been ordered in Karnataka’s elections on March 27, after reports of violations of election norms.

Other than Delhi and Bihar, we are not aware of any other of these state bar councils having declared results yet.