NEW DELHI/LUCKNOW/KOLKATA/DEHRADUN/GUWAHAT/KOCHI: The Opposition alliance INDIA bloc on Friday received a shot in the arm as it bagged four assembly seats in the bypolls to seven seats across six states.
The BJP secured three seats while the Congress, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Trinamool Congress, and the Samajwadi Party won one seat each. In Ghosi, the SP’s Sudhakar Singh defeated BJP candidate Dara Singh Chauhan by 42,759 votes.
Interestingly, the bypoll was necessitated after Chauhan, who had won the Ghosi seat in 2022 on an SP ticket, resigned after he joined the BJP. Chauhan was seen as a habitual party hopper and was rejected by the voters in his own stronghold. In the 2022 assembly polls, the saffron party won the elections and all turncoats, including Swami Prasad Maurya, faced defeat.
Chauhan was the only turncoat who had emerged victorious from Ghosi. The BJP won two seats in Tripura, where the party candidate Taffajal Hossain defeated CPI(M)’s Mizan Hossain by 30,237 votes in Boxanagar and Bindu Debnath drubbed CPI(M)’s Kaushik Chanda by 18,871 votes in Dhanpur.
In Jharkhand’s Dumri, the JMM’s Bebi Devi won by 17,000 votes, defeating AJSU’s Yashoda Devi. In Uttarakhand, BJP candidate Parvati Das won the Bageshwar seat by 2,405 votes. In West Bengal, the saffron party suffered a jolt as it failed to retain the Dhupguri constituency, where the TMC’s Nirmal Chandra Roy defeated the BJP’s Tapasi Roy by 4,309 votes.
In Kerala, Congress retained the Puthuppally seat with its candidate Chandy Oommen, the son of late Congress stalwart Oommen Chandy, trouncing the CPM’s Jaick C Thomas by a record margin of 37,719 votes.
On September 5, high voter turnout was recorded in most of the seven constituencies in six states.
READ HERE: