Bypolls for 13 Assembly seats in 7 states on July 10
New Delhi, June 10
The Election Commission on Monday announced the schedule for Assembly byelections for 13 seats spread across seven states, including three seats in Himachal Pradesh and one in Punjab.
The byelections will be held on July 10 on all the seats while counting will be held on July 13, the poll panel said.
The byelections were necessitated after several seats were vacated by the sitting MLAs to contest the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. The notification for the polls would be issued on June 14, while the last date for filing of nominations is June 21. The scrutiny of nominations will take place on June 24 and the last day for withdrawal of candidature is June 26.
In Punjab, the bypolls will be held for the Jalandhar West seat due to the resignation of MLA Sheetal Angural. He had resigned from AAP to join the BJP but later tried to withdraw his resignation. However, the Speaker accepted his resignation.
In Himachal Pradesh, the bypolls will be held on three seats of Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh, after the resignation of the independent MLAs — Hoshyar Singh, Ashish Sharma and K L Thakur — from these Assembly constituencies were accepted by the Speaker Kuldeep Singh Pathania.
The byelections are to be held on four seats of Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagda and Maniktala in West Bengal and two seats, namely Badrinath and Manglaur, in Uttarakhand.
The bypolls will also be held on one seat each in Rupauli in Bihar, Vikravandi in Tamil Nadu, and Amarwara in Madhya Pradesh. From Rupauli, JDU MLA Bima Bharti resigned after she joined the RJD to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Purnia. However she lost to Independent candidate Pappu Yadav.
In West Bengal’s Raiganj, MLA Krishna Kalyani had resigned to contest the Lok Sabha polls on the TMC ticket. Similarly, Mukut Mani Adhikari had resigned from the Ranaghat Dakshin seat and Biswajit Das from the Bagda seat. The bypolls at the Maniktala seat were necessitated following the death of MLA Sadhan Pandey.
Adhikari had quit the BJP to join the TMC ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Biswajit Das contested the polls from the Bangaon Lok Sabha seat but lost. In Tamil Nadu’s Vikravandi, the bypolls will be held due to the death of the sitting DMK MLA N Pugazhenthi.
In Madhya Pradesh’s Amarwara, the bypoll is being held due to the resignation of three-time Congress MLA Kamlesh Pratap Shah, who quit the party to join the BJP just before the LS poll.
