NEW DELHI: BJP won three of the six Lok Sabha and Assembly seats in the bypolls for which results were announced today with two daughters of late BJP leader Gopinath Munde among the victors and one of them won by a whopping seven lakh votes in Maharashtra.
Munde's daughters Pankaja and Pritam won Parli Assembly and Beed Lok Sabha seats respectively retaining their father's political legacy.
Pritam, who polled over nine lakh votes, trounced former Congress minister Ashok Patil by around seven lakh votes from Beed parliamentary constituency, poll officials said. The bypoll was necessitated following the death of Gopinath Munde in a road accident in Delhi this year.
Pankaja, Munde's eldest daughter and sitting BJP MLA, defeated her estranged cousin Dhananjay Munde, a NCP nominee from Parli Assembly seat by 25,895 votes.
BJD candidate Pratyusha Rajeswari Singh, widow of former MP Hemendra Chandra Singh, won the by-election for Kandhamal Lok Sabha seat in Odisha trouncing BJP's Rudramadhab Ray by a whopping 2,98,868 votes, official sources said in Bhubaneswar.
In her maiden poll battle, Pratyusha Rajeswari secured 4,77,529 votes while Ray, a former MP from Kandhamal Ray, polled 1,78,661 votes in a seven-cornered contest in the communally sensitive and Maoist-hit constituency, Kandhamal district election officer, Sumant Kar said.
Congress nominee Abhimanyu Behera, a former Phulbani MLA, was pushed to the third position securing 90,536 votes in the bypoll for the constituency, spread over four districts of Kandhamal, Ganjam, Nayagarh and Boudh.
BJP retained the Rajkot-West Assembly seat in Gujarat with a margin of over 23,000 votes. "BJP candidate Vijay Rupani won Rajkot-West Assembly seat by a margin of 23,740 votes at the end of the final 19th round," Deputy Election Officer Ketan Gandhi said. Rupani got 81,092 votes while Congress candidate Jayanti Kalaria managed 57,352 votes.
Interestingly, voters in the constituency chose NOTA (None of the Above) as the third alternative, as 3,110 votes were polled in its favour.
Samajwadi Party's Nahid Hasan won the Kairana Assembly seat by defeating his nearest rival BJP's Anil Chouhan.
Hasan got 83,984 votes while Chouhan polled 82,885 votes, said Returning Officer Suresh Kumar Mishra.
Congress' Gabriel Denwang Wangsu won the Kanubari Assembly seat in Arunachal Pradesh in a close contest defeating his lone rival Rongnai Maham of BJP by 885 votes.
Counting of votes in Hiyanglam in Manipur and in Northern Angami II for which bypolls were also held will be taken up tomorrow.