Vibha Sharma
New Delhi, November 6
The BJP on Sunday won four of the seven seats in Assembly bypolls across six states — Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Maharashtra and Telangana — with regional parties the RJD, Telangana Rashtra Samithi and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) bagging one seat each.
The BJP won Adampur in Haryana with party candidate Bhavya Bishnoi defeating his nearest rival, Congress’ Jai Prakash by 15,714 votes—a margin less than the last time. Bishnoi secured 67,492 votes against 51,752 by Jai Prakash.
The bypoll was necessitated after Bhavya's father Kuldeep Bishnoi switched sides from the Congress to the BJP. Notably, in 2019 Assembly elections, Kuldeep Bishnoi had defeated BJP’s Sonali Phogat by a margin of 29,417 votes.
In Maharashtra, Rutuja Latke, a candidate of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), won Andheri (East) assembly constituency that had fallen vacant due to the death of her husband Ramesh Latke.
Uddhav Thackeray said despite the party name and symbol “being snatched”, the ‘Mashaal’ (the new party symbol) “had been lit and the saffron flag unfurled”.
“This is the beginning of a fight which has begun with a victory. The forthcoming elections will be won similarly,” he said, after Rutuja won with 66,530 votes in the elections in which no major party contested but NOTA accounted for a very high 12,806 votes, 14.79 per cent of the total votes polled.
In Telangana, the ruling TRS won Munugode Assembly seat following a high-voltage contest with the BJP. TRS candidate Kusukuntla Prabhakar Reddy polled 97,006 votes and his nearest rival, BJP’s Komatireddy Raj Gopal Reddy, 86,697 votes.
Over 93 per cent polling was reported in the bypoll necessitated following the resignation of sitting Congress MLA, Komatireddy Raj Gopal Reddy, who joined the BJP.
The BJP retained the Gola Gokarannath Assembly seat in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpuri Kheri with party’s Aman Giri defeating Samajwadi Party candidate Vinay Tewari by over 34,000 votes. He polled as many as 1,24,810 votes on the seat that had fallen vacant after the death of his father, BJP MLA Arvind Giri.
With the BSP and the Congress keeping away from election, the main contest was between Aman and Tiwari, a former Gola Gokarannath MLA.
Bihar, which witnessed the first electoral test for the Nitish Kumar-led ‘Mahagathbandhan’ government the JD (U) parted ways with the BJP to join hands with the RJD, it was one each for the BJP and the RJD.
RJD candidate Neelam Devi won the Mokama seat by more than 16,000 votes over BJP’s Sonam Devi in the bypoll necessitated after the disqualification of Neelam Devi’s husband Anant Kumar Singh. The BJP contested from the Mokama for the first time as on previous occasions it had left the seat to allies.
Meanwhile, the BJP retained the Gopalganj Assembly seat with Kusum Devi, wife of MLA Subhash Singh whose death had necessitated the byelection, winning the seat. She polled 70,053 votes against her nearest rival, RJD’s Mohan Gupta, who got 68,259 votes.
In Odisha’s Dhamnagar, BJP candidate Suryabanshi Suraj won the seat securing 80,351 votes against his closest rival, BJD’s Abanti Das, who got 70,470 votes. The bypolls in the seven seats were held on November 3.
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