New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party suffered reverses as results of by-polls held for 14 seats – 4 Lok Sabha and 10 Assembly seats – across 10 states poured in Thursday. The bye-elections are widely being seen as indicative of popular sentiment against the ruling dispensation at the Centre. The elections have also given the united opposition a shot in the arm with significant wins in 11 of the 14 seats.
The saffron party suffered humiliating defeat in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra as it lost the Kairana Lok Sabha seat in the former and Bhandara-Gondiya seat in the latter; it managed to cling on to Palghar parliamentary seat in Maharashtra, but won only one of the 10 Assembly seats that went to polls in as many states.
Of the four Lok Sabha constituencies that voted May 24, the Nagaland returned the candidate of the ruling Nagaland Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP), a BJP ally, who defeated the Naga People’s Front (NPF) candidate.
The biggest shock for the BJP came from Kairana – a seat the BJP had won in 2014 – where the opposition fielded a lightweight candidate. Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) candidate Tabassum Hasan, supported by the Congress, the SP and the BSP, trounced the BJP’s Mriganka Singh in Kairana in Uttar Pradesh by over 55,000 votes.
The BJP along with its allies had swept 73 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 general elections and won an overwhelming 312 seats out of a total 423 in the state assembly elections last year. Along with the Kairana reverse, the BJP also suffered the ignominy of losing the Noorpur Assembly seat to the Samajwadi Party in UP. Samajwadi Party candidate Naimul Hassan defeated BJP’s Avani Singh by over 6,200 votes.
The Kairana defeat for the BJP comes on top of the failure to retain Gorakhpur and Phulpur in the by-elections in March this year in which the Samajwadi candidates, with the backing of BSP, had defeated BJP candidates.
In Palghar Lok Sabha seat in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win came in a triangular fight in which the candidate of its sulking ally, the Shiv Sena, cornered a considerable chunk of votes. BJP’s Rajendra Gavit defeated Shiv Sena’s Srinivas Wanga by over 29,500 votes.
However, the BJP candidate Hemant Patle had to bite the dust in the Bhandara-Gondiya seat in the state with the NCP’s Madhukar Kukde snatching the constituency that was won by the BJP in the 2014 poll. The Congress supported the NCP candidate in the current by poll. Kukde defeated Patle by over 45,000 votes.
RLD leader Jayant Chaudhary hoped that the combined opposition would keep its momentum to defeat the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections next year. “I am confident that the RLD will play a role in how to carry forward the opposition unity and alliance. Whatever the alliance, we will play a positive role,” he told reporters.
Of the 10 assembly seats where by-polls were held last Thursday, the BJP scored just one in Uttarakhand while the Congress won Punjab’s Shahkot, Karnataka’s RR Nagar and Meghalaya’s Ampati that made it the single largest party in the northeastern state.
The Trinamool Congress won the Maheshtala seat in West Bengal while the CPI-M candidate defeated a Congress rival in Kerala’s Chengannur.
Jailed politician Lalu Prasad’s RJD defeated the ruling BJP and JD-U’s joint candidate in Bihar’s Jokihat assembly seat where it was more of a battle of prestige for the former allies – the RJD and the JD-U. RJD’s Shahnawaz Alam beat a JD-U candidate by over 41,000 votes.
The Jokihat assembly seat was left vacant after the sitting JD-U lawmaker quit the party and joined the RJD following Nitish Kumar’s decision to go with the BJP last year.
The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha bagged both the Assembly seats of Silli and Gomia in the state.
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