Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 6: There is no change in the misfortune of the Congress which continue to suffer reverses while the BJP juggernaut continue to roll at the expense of the Congress in the by-elections for seven seats in five state assemblies the results of which were declared on Sunday.
The BJP emerged victorious in four of the seven assembly seats including retaining three seats it held earlier but it lost a prestigious fight in Telangana where its candidate, who had switched over from the Congress was defeated by the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, now re-named as the Bharat Rashtra Samiti.
In the first electoral battle since Nitish Kumar severed his relations with the BJP and stayed on as the Bihar chief minister joining hands with the RJD, the BJP retained the Gopalganj seat while the RJD retained Mokama in a repeat of general election results.
The BJP also retained the Gola Gorakhnath seat in Uttar Pradesh and Dhamnagar in Odisha while its nominee, a turncoat from the Congress, won the Adampur seat in Haryana. The Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena also met with its first electoral success when its candidate Rutuja Latke won the Andheri East seat in Maharashtra by over 66,000 votes in a one-sided contest as none of the political parties, including the BJP contested the seat hitherto held by her husband Ramesh Latke whose sudden death in May this year had caused the by-election.
Of the seven seats that went for the byelections, the BJP held three, the Congress two and the RJD and Shiv Sena one each. The Congress lost both the seats due to the defections by its victorious candidates to the BJP. Bihar is seeing the first contest – on two seats – since Nitish Kumar dumped the BJP to revive the JDU’s alliance with Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD. RJD candidate Neelam Devi, wife of Anant Singh who was disqualified after being convicted of illegally keeping guns, retained the Mokama seat for the RJD but the party failed to oust the BJP from Gopalganj which the saffron party is holding for more than two decades. RJD’s Mohan Prasad Gupta lost to the BJP’s Kusum Devi, whose husband Subhas Singh’s death necessitated the election.
In Haryana, former chief minister Bhajan Lal’s family seat Adampur went to the BJP this time with his grandson Bhavya Bishnoi winning the seat for the saffron party after switching from the Congress to BJP. Bhavya’s father Kuldeep Bishnoi, who led the family into the BJP, resigned as Adampur MLA as he defected, leading to this bypoll.
In Maharashtra’s Andheri East, Shiv Sena (Uddhav) candidate Rutuja Latke was given a free hand after the BJP withdrew its candidate and no other political party fielded one against her in a mark of respect to her deceased husband, a dedicated worker of the undivided Shiv Sena. The BJP had withdrawn its candidate as part of “political tradition” in polls necessitated by a leader’s death. Uddhav Thackeray’s faction, however, had called it “a script to save face” ahead of polls for the BMC, India’s richest civic body as it had sensed defeat in Andheri East.
Both the rivals, the BJP and the TRS had thrown their entire weight behind the Munugode bypoll and TRS candidate, K Prabhakar Reddy, took a big lead right from the beginning to be declared the winner by over 10,000 votes eventually. K Rajagopal Reddy, the BJP candidate, was with the Congress earlier. The by-election was necessitated after he quit the Congress to join the BJP. Mr Reddy’s defeat would be a humiliating turn for him and for the BJP in its quest to establish its supremacy in the southern state. The campaigns ahead of the Munugode bypoll saw heavy spending by both the TRS and the BJP.
In Odisha’s Dhamnagar, too, the ruling regional party BJD was contesting against the BJP. The BJP won it last time but MLA Bishnu Charan Sethi’s death led to this contest. The BJP fielded his son who won the seat for the party. In its stronghold UP, the BJP retained the Gola Gorakhnath seat, which fell vacant after the death of its MLA Arvind Giri on September 6. The BSP and Congress kept away from contesting the by-poll making it a direct fight between the Samajwadi Party and the ruling BJP which eventually retained the seat.
None of these contests will upset the math for current state governments. But, with regional parties looking to put together a united front for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections – just a year and a half away – these could serve as booster shots, or perception busters, but the results show that the BJP could take on the entire combined opposition on its own.
