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Trinamool Congress (TMC) supporters celebrate the party's victory in the Ballygunge Assembly by-elections, in Kolkata on Saturday. (ANI) A little over a month after it won elections in four states, the BJP suffered a setback in by-elections to four Assembly and one Lok Sabha seat, the results of which were announced on Saturday. The party could not win any of these elections, including for an Assembly seat in Bihar, where it is in power with the JD(U). In West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra, candidates of ruling parties emerged victorious.
The Trinamool Congress won both the Asansol Lok Sabha and Ballygunge Assembly seats, a signal that Mamata Banerjee continues to enjoy broad support in the state that she swept last May, even though the margin of the TMC’s victory in Ballygunge did come down.
In Asansol, TMC candidate Shatrughan Sinha, a former BJP leader, won a prestige battle against BJP MLA Agnimitra Paul by a massive margin of 3,03,209 votes. The seat had been won by Babul Supriyo for the BJP in 2014 and 2019, but the former Union minister switched to the TMC in September 2021, and became its candidate in the April 12 Ballygunge Assembly byelection.
Supriyo won the seat in South Kolkata by a margin of 20,228 votes, winning 51,199 votes. The CPM’s Saira Shah Halim got 30,971 votes and finished second. The BJP’s Keya Ghosh got 13,220 votes and lost her deposit.
In Bihar, the RJD took back the Bochaha Assembly seat in Muzaffarpur district after over two decades. The EBC Mallah leader Mukesh Sahani’s Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP), which was ousted from the NDA recently, celebrated the result, saying “its purpose of defeating BJP was served”.
The Bochaha seat was with the VIP, and the byelection was triggered by the death of its MLA Musafir Paswan. The RJD candidate Amar Kumar Paswan defeated the BJP’s Baby Kumari by a margin of 36,653 votes, while the VIP’s Geeta Kumari got 29,279 votes. Paswan, who joined the RJD recently, is the son of Musafir Paswan.
Amid a public fracas between the BJP and Shiv Sena, the victory of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) candidate in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur North Assembly seat came as a relief to the ruling alliance and a setback to the BJP. The Congress’s Jayshree Jadhav emerged victorious with a big margin of over 19,000 votes. Jadhav, the wife of deceased Congress MLA Chandrakant Jadhav, defeated Satyajit Kadam of the BJP.
A section of the Shiv Sena was initially not keen on supporting the Congress candidate but relented after directions from Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray. As the result was known, the Sena mocked state BJP president Chandrakant Patil, who had said he would quit politics and go to the Himalayas in the event of defeat for the party’s candidate.
Sena spokesperson Sanjay Raut said “the victory is creditable in the face of false charges being raked up by BJP against MVA leaders and its attempt to defame the government… All the three constituents of MVA who fought unitedly have set a good example… This should be replicated across Maharashtra.”
In Chhattisgarh, the ruling Congress won the Khairagarh seat in Rajnandgaon district by a margin of over 20,000 votes. The BJP candidate came second, while NOTA got the third highest votes. The seat was held by Devwrat Singh, who belonged to the royal family in Khairagarh. Formerly with the Congress, he had won the seat on a Janta Congress Chhattisgarh Jogi ticket.
Both the BJP and Congress had fielded candidates from the OBC community. The Congress’s Yashoda Verma won 87,640 votes against the BJP’s Komal Janghel, who got 67,481 votes. The JCCJ candidate got only 1,218 votes.
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