New Delhi
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies won two and the Congress won three out of the five seats where bypolls results were announced on Thursday, with focus on two sets of unexpected outcomes in Maharashtra and West Bengal.
The biggest surprise came from West Bengal, where the Congress-Left alliance candidate Bayron Biswas defeated the ruling Trinamool Congress candidate Debashish Banerjee by 22,986 votes in the Sagardighi assembly seat in Murshidabad district, the home district of the Congress leader in the Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary. The TMC has won the seat since 2011..
Biswas will be the lone Congress lawmaker in the assembly.
“This is not just my victory but thousands of Congress and Left workers across the state. It is a triumph of good over evil,” Biswas, a well-known ‘beedi’ baron of the area, told reporters.
Chowdhury said the party’s victory is dedicated to the joint fight of those supporting the Congress and the Left.
“This is a victory for the state’s Congress and the Left alliance. People have put their faith in us and have discarded both the TMC and the BJP. The TMC should remember that the beginning of their end has begun from the Murshidabad district,” he said.
In Maharashtra, votes were counted in the Pimpri-Chinchwad and Kasba Peth assembly constituencies. BJP candidate Ashwini Laxman Jagtap retained the former by winning with a margin of 36,168 votes. She beat the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) candidate Vitthal alias Nana Kate. The election was necessitated due to the death of Jagtap’s husband Pratap Jagtap.
But Kasba Peth sprung a surprise. Congress’s Dhangekar Ravindra Hemraj secured more than 72,000 votes and managed to win by a margin of 11,000 votes against BJP’s Hemant Narayana Rasane’s 61,000 votes. This the first time that the Congress has won the seat after 28 years, and is a shot in the arm for the embattled Maha Vikas Aghadi. “The outcome has showed us that if we fight polls unitedly and give tickets to those with elective merit, the victory is not far,” said Ajit Pawar, leader of Opposition in the assembly.
The bypoll happened after the death of BJP lawmaker Mukta Tilak, but the BJP did not nominate a family member of the senior leader.
Rasane said he would introspect where he went wrong and would rectify his mistakes. “The was a straight fight between BJP and Congress.”
In Erode (East) in Tamil Nadu, Congress candidate EVKS Elangovan defeated All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam candidate K S Thennarasu by 40,000 votes. THINK MARGIN IS WRONG
Elangovan, who represented the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-Congress alliance, got 65.7% of the total votes polled.
In 2021, Elangovan’s son Thirumahan Everaa won the seat by 8,904 votes, defeating AIADMK’s M Yuvaraja. Everaa’s death in January necessitated this bypoll which his father and Congress veteran Elangovan fought.
The defeat was seen as a setback for Tamil Nadu’s Opposition, led by Edappadi Palaniswami who is considered dominant in the state’s western region, which includes the Erode district. “Democracy has lost. Money has won,” Thennarasu told reporters in Erode. Elangovan attributed the win to chief minister MK Stalin. “People have given us this victory because he has fulfilled 80% of the election promises he had made in 20-months of his governance,” Elangovan said.
In Jharkhand’s Ramgarh, Sunita Chaudhary of All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) Party won over Congress pick Bajrang Mahto. The election was necessitated after Mahto’s wife, Mamata Devi, was convicted in a corruption case. AJSU is a BJP ally.
One assembly seat in Arunachal Pradesh was won unopposed by BJP candidate Myrolborn Syiem.