The results for the four Assembly byelections, declared by the Election Commission on Friday, saw an upset win for the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala’s Pala, while the BJP retained Badharghat in Tripura and Hamirpur in Uttar Pradesh, but lost Dantewada to the Congress in Chhattisgarh.
Considered a bastion of the Congress-led UDF and held by the leader of the Kerala Congress (Mani) [KC(M)] K.M. Mani for 54 years, Pala represents a significant victory for the ruling LDF.
The LDF candidate and NCP leader, Mani C. Kappan, bagged 54,137 votes to trounce his nearest rival Jose Tom Pulikkunnel, who contested as the UDF’s Independent candidate, by a margin of 2,943 votes. N. Hari of the BJP managed only 18,044 votes to finish a distant third. In the 2016 Assembly election, Mr. Kappan got 54,181 votes, against 58, 884 votes for K.M. Mani. The vote share of the BJP registered a sharp decline as it got 7,690 fewer votes.
In the Badharghat Assembly seat in Agartala, BJP’s Mimi Majumder defeated Bulti Biswas, a CPI(M) municipal corporation councilor, by a margin of 5,276 votes. Ms. Majumder won 44.6% of the votes cast, with 20,487 votes. However, both the BJP and the CPI(M) got fewer votes compared to Assembly elections in 2018. The seat had fallen vacant after the death of five-time MLA Dilip Sarkar in April.
In U.P., the BJP retained the Hamirpur seat that became vacant when the incumbent Ashok Kumar Singh Chandel was sentenced to life imprisonment in a case of murder. Yuwraj Singh of the BJP won with 38.55% of the votes, securing 74,409 votes.
His closest rival, Dr. Manoj Kumar Prajapati of the Samajwadi Party, got 56,542 votes.
In Chhattisgarh’s reserved Dantewada seat, former Congress MLA Devti Karma strode to victory by a margin of 11,192 votes. Ms. Karma polled 50,028 votes while her nearest rival, the BJP’s Ojaswi Mandavi, secured 38,836 votes.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) candidate Bhimsen Mandavi stood third with 7,664 votes.
The death of Ms Mandavi’s husband and sitting MLA Bhima Mandavi in a Maoist attack in April led to the bypoll. Ms Karma’s husband Mahendra Karma was killed in a similar attack in 2013.
Close to 60% of eligible voters had voted this time. In the 2018 Assembly election, the BJP had scrambled for a toehold in the region, with Ms. Mandavi’s husband Bhima Mandavi winning the election.
While on the stump in April, two days before the Lok Sabha election, he was killed in a Maoist attack.
