The Bharatiya Janata Party on Sunday won four out of seven seats for which bye-elections were held on November 3. The party emerged victorious in Bihar’s Gopalganj, Uttar Pradesh’s Gola Gokrannath, Odisha’s Dhamnagar and Haryana’s Adampur.
Meanwhile, the K Chandrashekar’s Rao-led Telangana Rashtra Samithi defeated the BJP in Telangana’s Munugode and the Rashtriya Janata Dal won the Mokama constituency in Bihar. In Maharashtra, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction secured a comfortable victory in the Andheri (East) Assembly seat in Mumbai.
The polling for these seven Assembly constituencies was held on November 3. The BJP previously held three seats, the Congress two and the Shiv Sena and the Rashtriya Janata Dal one each.
Telangana
The bye-polls in Telangana’s Munugode were necessitated after Congress MLA Komatireddy Raj Gopal Reddy resigned in August and joined the BJP. He re-contested on a BJP ticket and his main rivals were former legislators Kusukuntla Prabhakar Reddy of the TRS and Palvai Sravanthi of the Congress.
Prabhakar Reddy defeated Gopal Reddy by a margin of 10,309 votes in the bye-election. He received 97,006 votes, while the BJP candidate got 86,697 votes.
Bihar
In Bihar, Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Neelam Devi, the wife of Anant Singh who was disqualified after being convicted of illegally keeping guns, won the Mokama Assembly seat with 79,744 votes, while BJP’s Sonam Devi received 63,003 votes.
In Gopalganj, BJP candidate Kusum Devi defeated the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Mohan Prasad Gupta by 1,794 votes.
The bye-polls to the Mokama and Gopalganj Assembly constituencies are the first electoral test for Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who cut ties with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in August and formed a new coalition government with the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Congress and Left parties.
Uttar Pradesh
In Uttar Pradesh, the Gola Gokarnnath constituency saw a direct contest between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party. The seat fell vacant after five-time MLA Arvind Giri died last month.
His son and BJP candidate Aman Giri won the seat by securing 1,24,810 votes, while the Samajwadi Party’s Vinay Tiwari got 90,512 votes.
Haryana
The bye-poll in Adampur was necessitated after former sitting MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi resigned from the Vidhan Sabha in August to switch from the Congress to the BJP. His son Bhavya Bishnoi contested the election as a BJP candidate against Congress’ Jai Prakash, a former Union minister.
Bhavya Bishnoi won the election, defeating the Congress candidate by 15,740 votes.
Odisha
In Odisha’s Dhamnagar, Biju Janata Dal has fielded Abanti Das, the only woman among the five candidates. BJP MLA Bishnu Charan Sethi’s death necessitated the bye-elections. The saffron party fielded his son Suryabanshi Suraj.
Suraj won the election by securing 80,351 votes while Das was in the second spot with 70,470 votes. Congress candidate Baba Harekrushna Sethi garnered 3,561 votes.
Maharashtra
The Andheri East polling in Maharashtra was held after the death of Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Latke. His wife and the nominee of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction, Rutuja Latke, was pitted against six candidates.
Latke won the election comfortably with 66,530 votes in her favour. The next largest number of votes (12,806) was for “none of the above”, or NOTA.
The BJP withdrew its candidate Murji Patel from the contest on October 17. It claimed that it did so as a gesture of respect for Ramesh Latke.
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