NEW DELHI: India has two distinct voting patterns: major and minor. The BJP tends to win the big-ticket elections, but loses many of the small ones that come in between. As the results to a clutch of byelections filtered in on Saturday, voters across four states reinforced a pattern seen before 2019: the BJP drew a blank in five constituencies. In one Lok Sabha and four assembly seats strewn across West Bengal, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, morale-boosting victories were registered by Trinamool Congress (TMC), Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).
In the biggest verdict, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC wrested the Asansol Lok Sabha seat, with saffron renegade Shatrughan Sinha pulling off a upset over his former party. He defeated Agnimitra Paul of BJP by a jaw-dropping 3,03,209 votes.
Asansol was a BJP bastion. In 2019, its then star candidate, singer Babul Supriyo, had taken the seat with 1.97 lakh votes. In what would be a source of double delight for Mamata, Supriyo is now on her side, and was the winner in the other Bengal bypoll: to the Ballygunge assembly seat. More than his 20,228-vote margin against nearest rival, Saira Shah Halim of CPI-M, what was notable was the modest 13,220 votes polled by BJP’s Keya Ghosh.
Congress, which has not been receiving a lot of good news of late, turned things around with two victories against BJP. In Maharashtra, it retained Kolhapur North. Jayashri Jadhav, contesting under the Congress-Maha Vikas Aghadi umbrella, defeated BJP’s Satyajeet Kadam by over 18,000 votes.
In Chhattisgarh, Congress’s Yashoda Verma took the Khairagarh seat by a margin of 20,176 votes against BJP’s Komal Janghel. In Bihar, the ruling NDA suffered an embarrassment as RJD wrested the Bochahan seat from it, with Amar Paswan defeating BJP’s Baby Kumari by 37,000 votes.