BJP ally Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) retained the Samastipur Lok Sabha seat while the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) retained the Satara parliamentary seat in byelection results declared on Thursday.
LJP’s Prince Raj, son of party MP Ram Chandra Paswan, whose death in July necessitated the bypoll, defeated Ashok Kumar of the Congress by a margin of 1,02,090 votes.
In Satara, NCP’s Shriniwas Dadasaheb Patil had a lead of over 85,000 votes over the BJP’s Udayanraje Bhonsale. Mr. Bhonsale’s resignation and defection to the BJP in September had necessitated the bypoll.
Of the 51 Assembly byelections across the country, the opposition Congress and ruling BJP won three seats each in the six bypolls in Gujarat. OBC leader Alpesh Thakor, who defected to the BJP from the Congress during the Lok Sabha polls, was defeated in Radhanpur. Congress candidate Raghu Desai took the seat with a margin of 3,807 votes.
Nitish jolted
In a setback for Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the NDA won just one of the five Assembly seats while the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal took two — Simri Bakhtiarpur and Belhar. The JD(U) retained Nathnagar, where Laxmikant Mandal defeated RJD’s Rabiya Khatun in a keenly contested poll.
Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM made its debut in the Bihar Assembly. Qamrul Hoda of the AIMIM defeated the BJP’s Sweety Singh in Kishanganj.
The Samajwadi Party turned out the big gainer in the Uttar Pradesh by-polls as it wrested two seats — one each from the BJP and the BSP — to win three out of the 11 bypolls. An active campaign by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath himself could not prevent the BJP from dropping a seat in the State, where it has over 300 legislators in the 403-member Assembly.
The BSP also suffered a setback as the only seat it had in its control, Jalalpur in Ambedkar Nagar, was won by the SP. Out of the 11 seats that went to the polls, the BJP previously had nine under its fold. But after Thursday’s result, it has seven seats while another, Pratapgarh, was secured by its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal).
After its complete rout in this year’s Lok Sabha elections, the ruling Congress won one of the two Assembly seats that held bypolls in Rajasthan. The party, which had lost all the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the State, won the Mandawa seat in Jhunjhunu district by a huge margin of 33,704 votes, but the party was defeated in Nagaur district’s Khinvsar constituency.
The Rashtriya Loktantrik Party, supported by the BJP as an alliance partner, retained Khinvsar, where the bypoll was necessitated after the election of RLP founder-president Hanuman Beniwal to the Lok Sabha from Nagaur.
The Congress won three seats and the Akali Dal one seat in Punjab.
In Madhya Pradesh, the Congress wrested back the Jhabua Assembly seat from the BJP. Congress candidate and former Union minister Kantilal Bhuria won by a margin of over 27,804 votes, defeating BJP’s Bhanu Bhuria.
In the northeast, the BJP won three of the four bypolls in Assam — Ratabari, Rangapara and Sonari — while one seat Jania was won by the All-India United Democratic Front. An independent, Chakat Aboh, won the Khonsa West seat of Arunachal Pradesh.
The Congress won the one seat that had by-election in Chhattisgarh. The BJP won both seats in Himachal Pradesh that had by-polls. In Kerala, two seats each went to the CPI(M) and the Congress and one to the IUML. The BJD and the Congress won one each in Odisha and Puducherry respectively.