New Delhi: The Left Democratic Front candidate Mani C Kappan emerged victorious in the Pala assembly bypolls that was held on September 23. He defeated United Democratic Front’s Jose Tom by a margin on 2,943 votes.
This is the first time in 54 years that the constituency has chosen a representative not from the Congress party. The constituency till now had singularly stood behind Kerala Congress chief KM Mani. The seat, which went to polls earlier this week on Monday, had registered a voter turnout of 71.41%.
The victory came as a huge morale booster for the ruling LDF in the state after its abysmal performance in the Lok Sabha elections, where it won only one of the 20 seats.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP won the Hamirpur assembly seat that fell vacant following the conviction of BJP MLA Ashok Kumar Chandel in a 22-year-old murder case.
BJP's Yuvraj Singh won with a margin of 17,771 votes and bagged 74,168 votes while Samajwadi Party candidate Manoj Prajapati secured 56,397 votes and BSP's Naushad Ali got 28,749 votes.
The performance of the BJP in bypolls since 2014 when the saffron party came to power in the state has not been particularly impressive, and it has been able to win only five of the 23 seats that saw by-elections during this period.
The Dantewada seat in Naxal-affected Chhattisgarh was won by Congress candidate Devti Karma, the wife of Mahendra Karma who was known as the 'Tiger of Bastar'. In a direct contest between the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP, the winner defeated BJP MLA Bhima Mandavi's wife. The bypoll was necessitated after Bhima Mandavi's death in a Maoist attack in April.
Devti Karma polled 50,028 votes, while Ojaswi Mandavi received 38,836 votes. The Communist Party of India (CPI)’s Bhimsen Mandavi finished third with over 7,000 votes while NOTA got 5,779 votes. The voter turnout in the bypoll in Dantewada, a seat reserved for Scheduled Tribe candidates, had been registered at 60.59%.
BJP candidate Mimi Majumder, meanwhile, won the bypoll to Badharghat (SC) Assembly constituency in Tripura. She defeated her nearest rival, CPI(M)'s Bulti Biswas, by 5,276 votes, said officials.
The bypolls in Badharghat assembly constituency, which registered a voter turnout of 79.29%, had been necessitated due to the death of sitting MLA Dilip Sarkar on April 1. Congress nominee Ratan Chandra Das secured the third place, but his vote share increased 18 times compared to what he had got in the Assembly polls in February last year. Both the BJP and the CPI(M) got fewer votes in comparison to what they bagged in the Assembly elections.
Comments
0 comment