Opposition
INDIA bloc
parties secured 10 assembly seats, while BJP won two and an independent candidate clinched one as votes were counted Saturday for
bypolls
held Wednesday for 13 constituencies in seven states — four in Bengal, three in Himachal Pradesh, two in Uttarakhand, and one each in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu.
Trinamool Congress
(TMC) won all four seats in Bengal, wresting three from BJP and retaining one, taking its tally to 222 in the 294-seat Bengal assembly.
The party took Bagda, Ranaghat South, and Raiganj from BJP and retained Maniktala, with big margins.
Key wins included Supti Pandey in Maniktala and Madhuparna Thakur in Bagda — Bengal’s youngest legislator at 25 years and one month. Madhuparna defeated BJP’s Binay Kumar Biswas by 33,455 votes, while 66-year-old Supti outdid her husband and former minister Sadhan Pandey of BJP by 62,312 votes.
Krishna Kalyani defeated BJP’s Manas Kumar Ghosh by 50,007 votes in Raiganj — giving TMC its first win in the constituency. Mukut Nami Adhikari defeated BJP’s Manoj Kumar Biswas by 39,048 votes in Ranaghat South, which TMC had last won 13 years ago. Both Kalyani and Adhikari had joined TMC after their 2021 assembly wins, but had lost 2024 Lok Sabha polls as Trinamool candidates.
In Himachal,
Congress
candidate and CM Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh Thakur defeated BJP’s Hoshiyar Singh by 9,399 votes in Dehra. Kamlesh polled 32,737 votes (57.94%), while Singh got 23,338 votes (41.3%). Congress’s Hardeep Singh Bawa won Nalagarh against BJP’s KL Thakur by 25,618 votes. BJP won the Hamirpur seat by a narrow margin of 1,571 votes with Ashish Sharma polling 27,041 votes against Congress’s Pushpinder Verma’s 25,470 votes.
Wednesday’s bypolls were necessitated after three former independent MLAs — Hoshiyar Singh, Ashish Sharma, and KL Thakur — resigned in March and joined BJP.
With these two victories, Congress has increased its tally from 38 to 40 in the 68-seat Vidhan Sabha, while BJP’s total seats have risen from 27 to 28. Before the Feb rebellion, when six of its MLAs left to join BJP, Congress held 40 seats. On June 4, by winning four of the six seats in the bypolls, Congress had bolstered its position from 34 to 38 seats.
In Uttarakhand, after suffering a crushing defeat in the LS polls, where it lost all five seats to BJP, Congress made a strong comeback by winning two assembly bypolls, with its candidates Lakhapat Singh Butola and Qazi Mohammad Nizamuddin taking the Badrinath and Manglaur seats, respectively. Butola won by 5,095 votes, defeating Rajendra Singh Bhandari, who had switched from Congress to BJP just before LS polls. Nizamuddin’s victory was by a slender margin of 422 votes over BJP’s Kartar Singh Bhadana.
In Madhya Pradesh, BJP’s Kamlesh Pratap Shah won the Amarwara seat by 3,027 votes against Congress’s Dheeran Sah Invati. Congress led until the 17th round, but BJP clawed back in the 20th and 21st rounds. BJP was elated as it succeeded in dismantling another stronghold of Congress stalwart Kamal Nath. In both the 2018 and 2023 assembly elections, Congress won all seven assembly segments in Chhindwara, which the former CM represented in LS for nine terms. For the first time in 44 years, BJP defeated Congress in Chhindwara in an LS election, with Vivek Bunty Sahu defeating Kamal Nath’s son Nakul by over 1.1 lakh votes this year.
DMK retained the Vikravandi assembly constituency in Tamil Nadu, with candidate Anniyur Siva winning by a margin of 67,169 votes. Siva secured 1.23 lakh votes against PMK’s C Anbumani, who polled 56,026 votes. The bypolls, held after the death of DMK MLA N Pugazhenthi, saw 82.48% voter turnout. CM MK Stalin attributed the win to overcoming “slanderous campaigns and lies” from BJP-led alliance over the govt’s handling of illicit arrack sales, which claimed 66 lives in Kallakurichi recently.
In Punjab, AAP’s Mohinder Bhagat won the Jalandhar West seat by defeating BJP’s Sheetal Angural by 37,325 votes. The seat fell vacant after Angural resigned as the AAP legislator and joined BJP in March along with AAP MP Sushil Rinku. Bhagat was with BJP before he switched to AAP during LS bypolls of 2023. His father Chunni Lal was a BJP minister and had won the constituency thrice, including when it was Jalandhar South, before delimitation.
Independent candidate Shankar Singh won Bihar’s Rupauli seat, defeating JD(U) nominee Kaladhar Mandal by 8,246 votes and pushing RJD nominee Bima Bharti to third place. The bypolls were necessitated after Bharti, the incumbent JD(U) MLA, switched to RJD to contest the Purnia LS seat, where she lost to independent candidate Pappu Yadav.
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