PremiumAssembly bypolls have kickstarted in six states on Thursday, 3 November. people have begun queuing up at seven assembly seats where by-polls are taking place today. The six by-election seats include-Gopalganj and Mokoma (Bihar), Adampur (Haryana), Andheri East (Maharashtra), Dhamnagar (Odisha), Munugode, Haryana: (Telangana), and Gola Goraknnath (Uttar Pradesh), respectively.
Among the seven seats where by-polls are being held, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held three seats, the Congress two while the Shiv Sena and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had one each.
While a victory in the bypolls will be inconsequential to their position in the assemblies, the parties have not taken the contest lightly and carried out a high-pitched campaign.
The counting of votes will take place on November 6.
Mumbai's Andheri East assembly seat recorded a 3.61% voter turnout till 9:00 am. The assembly seat has a total of 2,71,502 eligible voters.
Telangana's Munugode seat has recorded 11.20 % voter turn out so far. As many as 2,41,855 voters could cast their vote in the Munugode bypolls.
Visuals from Bihar, where people casting votes for the by-elections in Mokama Assembly Constituency.
The by-polls to the two seats are the first election in the state after the formation of the 'Mahagthabandhan' government around three months back.
The polling began at 7 am, and will continue till 6 pm, election officials said. While 2.70 lakh people are eligible to exercise their franchise in Mokama, the number of voters in Gopalganj is 3.31 lakh.
Of the total 15 candidates in the fray, nine are contesting from Gopalganj and six are in the fray from Mokama.
BJP leader Kusum Devi is pitted against RJD's Mohan Gupta in Gopalganj. The BJP candidate is the wife of former MLA Subhash Singh whose death necessitated the by-election.
For RJD, which is looking to wrest the seat from the BJP, it is a prestige fight as Gopalganj is the home district of party chief Lalu Prasad.
In Mokama, BJP nominee Sonam Devi is up against RJD’s Neelam Devi, whose husband Anant Singh’s disqualification has necessitated the by-election.
Mokama is the stronghold of Anant Singh since 2005. He won the seat twice on JD(U) ticket.
Singh fought as an RJD candidate in the 2020 elections and retained the seat. But, he was disqualified from the assembly following his conviction in a criminal case.
BJP candidate Sonam Devi, wife of local muscleman Lalan Singh who has been opposed to Anant Singh, is a greenhorn. Her husband is known to be a confidant of dreaded gangster-turned-politician Suraj Bhan Singh.
Suraj Bhan Singh made his electoral debut in the 2000 assembly elections when he wrested the Mokama seat, by an astounding margin, contesting as an Independent and defeating Anant Singh’s elder brother Dilip Singh, who was a minister in the Rabri Devi government.
The BJP is contesting from the Mokama constituency for the first time as the saffron party had, on previous occasions, left the seat to its allies.
The by-election to the Andheri East Assembly constituency was necessitated due to the death of Rutuja Latke's husband and Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Latke in May this year. It is the first election after the revolt in the Shiv Sena by Eknath Shinde and 39 other legislators led to the collapse of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government.
Rutuja Latke, the nominee of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction, is expected to register a comfortable win. She is pitted against six candidates- four of them Independents. The NCP and Congress have supported her candidature.
The bypolls in Haryana's Adampur assembly constituency will decide if the Bhajan Lal family holds on to its bastion of five decades.
The Adampur seat has been held by the Bhajan Lal family since 1968, with the the late ex-chief minister representing it on nine occasions, his wife Jasma Devi once and Kuldeep on four occasions.
Twenty-two candidates, all men, are in the fray. The main parties contesting are the BJP, Congress, Indian National Lok Dal and the Aam Aadmi Party.
Former chief minister Bhajan Lal's younger son Kuldeep Bishnoi has maintained that Adampur has been his family's citadel, and that people have showered their love and blessings on it for decades and would do so once again.
The bypoll was necessitated after Kuldeep Bishnoi resigned as MLA from the seat and switched sides from the Congress to the BJP in August.
Bishnoi's son Bhavya, who is contesting the bypoll as the BJP candidate, had also quit the Congress and joined the BJP.
Bhavya (29) had lost 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Hisar to BJP's bureaucrat-turned-politician Brijendra Singh.
The Congress has fielded former Union minister Jai Prakash, a three-time MP from Hisar and two-time MLA as well.
The INLD picked Congress rebel Kurda Ram Nambardar as its candidate. The AAP has fielded Satender Singh, who switched over from the BJP.
Kuldeep Bishnoi defeated late Sonali Phogat, who had contested on a BJP ticket, in Adampur in the 2019 assembly elections.
Polling started at 7 am and will continue till 6 pm on Thursday. The counting of votes will be taken up on November 6.
Polling was underway amid tight security in the bypoll to Munugode Assembly constituency in Telangana on Thursday. Voting began at 7 am and will continue till 6 am.
Over 2.41 lakh voters are eligible to exercise their franchise in the election.
There are a total of 298 polling stations and web casting would be done from all of them. Of the total, 105 booths have been identified as 'critical.'
The bypoll has been necessitated by the resignation of sitting Congress MLA Komatireddy Raj Gopal Reddy from the party from his post in August. He has joined the BJP and is seeking re-election.
While 47 candidates are in the fray, the main contest is confined to Raj Gopal Reddy (BJP), former MLA Kusukuntla Prabhakar Reddy of TRS and Congress' Palvai Sravanthi.
The bypoll has assumed a critical political significance as the winner would have an edge over others ahead of next year's Legislative Assembly polls in Telangana.
Here, the bypoll was necessitated after BJP MLA Arvind Giri died on 6 September. The main contest in the Gola Gokarannath constituency is between the BJP's Aman Giri, the son of Arvind Giri, and Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate and former Gola Gokarannath MLA Vinay Tiwari.
Arvind Giri joined the BJP ahead of the 2017 polls and contested from his native constituency against the SP's Tiwari.
Riding on the Modi wave and his own ground support, Giri wrested the seat from the SP in 2017, and in the 2022 polls, Giri retained the seat.
Issues related to farmers, including cane dues, crop procurement and floods, assume prominence during the polls.
The polling is being held in Mokama and Gopalganj assembly constituencies of Bihar, Andheri (East) of Maharashtra, Adampur of Haryana, Munugode of Telangana, Gola Gokaran Nath of Uttar Pradesh, and Dhamnagar of Odisha.
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