INDIA bloc candidate and Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife, Kamlesh Thakur, won the Dehra assembly bypoll in Himachal Pradesh today, while the alliance’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) took the Jalandhar West seat.
In Himachal Pradesh, Congress leader Kamlesh Thakur defeated her closest rival, BJP’s Hoshyar Singh, by over 9,000 votes in the Dehra constituency. Another Congress candidate is leading in Nalagarh, while the BJP is ahead in Hamirpur.
AAP’s Mohinder Bhagat won the bypoll in Punjab’s Jalandhar West assembly segment by more than 30,000 votes.
In West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress is leading in all four seats. The party won the Maniktala seat in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections, while the BJP initially won Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, and Bagda. However, these BJP MLAs later switched to Trinamool.
In Uttarakhand, the Manglaur constituency is witnessing a three-way contest in the bypoll held after the death of BSP MLA Sarwat Karim Ansari in October last year. The BJP is currently trailing in Manglaur, a seat dominated by Muslim and Dalit voters that has been held either by the Congress or the BSP so far. The BJP is also trailing in Badrinath.
The Bihar byelection was necessitated by the resignation of sitting MLA Bima Bharti, who had won the seat for Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) several times in the past but recently quit the party to contest Lok Sabha elections on an RJD ticket. The JD(U) is currently ahead.
In Tamil Nadu’s Vikravandi assembly constituency, the bypoll was prompted by the death of DMK legislator N Pughazhendhi on April 6. The contest is between the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (DMK) candidate Anniyur Siva (alias Sivashanmugam A), Pattali Makkal Katchi’s (PMK) C Anbumani, and Naam Tamilar Katchi’s K Abinaya, with Siva currently leading.
In Madhya Pradesh’s Chhindwara district, the Amarwara assembly seat by-election was held after three-time Congress MLA Kamlesh Shah switched to the BJP in March. The main contest is between the BJP’s Kamlesh Shah, the Congress’s Dheeran Shah Invati, and the Gondwana Gantantra Party’s (GGP) Devraman Bhalavi. Invati is currently leading.
Voting took place in 13 Assembly seats across seven states: four in West Bengal, three in Himachal Pradesh, two in Uttarakhand, and one each in Bihar, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu.
The constituencies included Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagda, and Maniktala in West Bengal; Dehra, Hamirpur, and Nalagarh in Himachal Pradesh; Badrinath and Manglaur in Uttarakhand; Jalandhar West in Punjab; Rupauli in Bihar; Vikravandi in Tamil Nadu; and Amarwara in Madhya Pradesh. Four of these states are governed by INDIA bloc constituents, while the rest have BJP or NDA governments.
These bypolls were the first since the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, where the BJP won 240 seats, 32 short of the majority. The NDA, however, crossed the halfway mark of 272 with a total of 293 seats. The Congress-led INDIA bloc secured 232 seats.
