BHUBANESWAR: BJD nominee Barsha Singh Bariha won the Padampur Assembly bypoll by over 40,000 votes (57 per cent of the votes polled in the election) defeating BJP’s Pradeep Purohit.
At the end of 18th round of counting, Barsha polled 104,183 votes, Pradeep Purohit bagged 68,887 votes while Congress candidate Satya Bhusan Sahu had 3210 votes.
The bypoll was necessitated by the death of incumbent MLA Bijaya Ranjan Singh Bariha on October 3. While the ruling BJD had fielded Bariha’s daughter Barsha, BJP had pinned hope on Purohit, who won the seat in 2014 and lost to Bariha in 2019 with a margin of 5734 votes.
Owing to a tight fight after the BJP’s success in Dhamnagar bypoll, BJD’s star campaigner and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik campaigned for Barsha a day before the end of campaigning for the bypoll. A law graduate Barsha had to face a lot of heat from the Opposition BJP during the campaign with the latter branding her an outsider. The BJD had strongly comdemed it.
Even as the bypoll was expected to be a tight fight between the ruling BJD and the BJP, the result favours BJD which seems to have set the tone ahead of the assembly and Lok Sabha elections in 2024.