JOIN USThe Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday suffered a major setback ahead of the crucial civic polls in the national capital with its candidate for Delhi’s Rajouri Garden bypoll losing his deposit.
While the AAP was the only party to lose a sitting seat, the BJP won five out of the 10 Assembly seats in the bypolls to seven states, while the Congress emerged winner in three and Trinamool Congress and Jharkhand Multi Morcha (JMM) one each.
The AAP’s relegation to third position in Rajouri Garden comes ahead of the elections to three municipal corporations in the capital on April 23.
The BJP’s Manjinder Singh Sirsa trounced his nearest Congress rival Meenakshi Chandela by 14,652 votes. The AAP’s Harjeet Singh could garner only 10,243 votes, way below the votes required to save his deposit.
The Congress bagged three seats — two in Karnataka and one in Madhya Pradesh — while the saffron party won one seat each in Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Assam, besides Delhi.
The Trinamool Congress won the lone seat – Kanthi Dakshin – that went to bypolls in West Bengal, while the JMM managed to keep Littapara, its stronghold in Jharkhand, under its belt for one more time.
Trinamool’s Chandrima Bhattacharya registered the highest victory margin of 42,526 votes in Kanthi Dakshin sea. The BJP tripled its vote share from around 15,000 in the 2016 Assembly polls to 52,875 votes in the bypoll.
Congress candidate Naba Kumar Nanda polled just 2,270 (1.33%) of the 1.70 lakh votes polled, while CPI’s Uttar Pradhan got 17,423 votes or 10.21%.
In 2016, the Congress and the Left had fielded a common candidate and had garnered 34.73% votes.
The biggest victory for the BJP was in Rajasthan’s Dholpur where Shobha Rani Kushwah, whose husband had to resign after he was convicted in a case, defeated the Congress’s Banwari Lal Sharma by a margin of 38,673 votes.
In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP won its sitting seat – Bandhavgarh – by a whopping 25,476 votes, but it lost to Congress in Ater in a nail biting finish.
Congress candidate Hemant Katare had anxious moment as the party staved off a stiff challenge from the BJP to emerge victorious by a margin of 857 votes.
Shivnarayan Singh (BJP) defeated Savitri Singh in Bandhavgarh.Bhoranj in Himachal Pradesh was another seat where the BJP continued its winning streak for 27 years with its candidate Anil Dhiman winning by a comfortable margin of 8,290. The BJP’s winning run in Assam also continued with Ranoj Pegu retaining the Dhemaji seat by 9,285 votes.
Interestingly, all the five BJP winners got more than 50% of the votes polled.In Littapara, the BJP had worked hard to break the JMM hold over the seat by firing all cylinders, but this time, too, voters went with the Shibu Soren-led party. JMM's Simon Marandi defeated the BJP’s Hemlal Murmu by 12,900 votes.