In Gujarat, the BJP’s “double engine” crushed Congress in all eight seats for which by-elections were held, including five in Saurashtra and the tribal-dominated Dang constituency. Five of the victors are MLA renegades from Congress who had switched sides prior to the Rajya Sabha Polls. In the 182-member House, the BJP now has 111 seats compared to 65 in Congress.
Manipur was the third state where BJP scored a near perfect 4 in the strongholds of Congress. The fifth seat in Congress was captured by an independent.
Uttar Pradesh also played with the BJP script, strengthening CM Yogi Adityanath’s hand with a six-on-six show in party-held seats, including the Bangarmau constituency that used to represent rape and murder convict Kuldeep Singh Sengar. One of the BJP winners was the wife of the late cricketer-turned-politician Chetan Chauhan, Sangeeta Chauhan, who won the Naugawan Sadat seat that was left vacant when her husband died after a Covid-19 bout in August.
The Samajwadi Party it narrowly retained the seventh seat of the UP that went to the vote, maintaining the status quo in the assembly.
BJP continued its march on Karnataka, seizing Sira’s seat from JD (S) and RR Nagar in Congress to silence opponents of CM BS Yediyurappa and possibly put a brake on talks about a leadership change. As in Gujarat, voters re-elected a renegade MLA from Congress who was contesting RR Nagar’s seat on a BJP ballot. Winner N Munirathna’s resignation after crossing had necessitated bypoll. The strength of the saffron party in the House is now 119, while the Congress has 67 and JD (S) 33 MLA.
In Telangana, BJP engineered something of a coup when their candidate M Raghunandan Rao beat Chandrashekar Rao-led TRS nominee Solipeta Sujatha by a narrow margin of 1,079 votes in Dubbak’s election. For Raghunandan, it was his fourth lucky time at Dubbak after finishing three times on the losing end.
Sources said the verdict could well be an affirmation of how Telangana’s future policy will play out, with the BJP replacing Congress as the main opposition party in the state. The first sign of this was that BJP won four seats for the first time in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
In MP, 18 of the 19 seats won by the BJP were those lost by Congress.
For the big game, the big win came in Chhattisgarh, where he snatched the seat from Marwahi (ST), a stronghold of the Ajit Jogi family for almost two decades. Dr. Krishna Kumar Dhruw defeated Dr. Gambhir Singh of BJP by more than 38,197 votes there. The nearly 25% difference in the percentage of votes told the story: while the ruling Congress got 56% of the votes, the BJP got 30.4%.
With this victory, Congress now has 70 seats in the 90-member assembly after winning Dantewada and Chitrakot (ST) by election in September last year.
One of the two Nagaland The seats that went to the polls were won by NDPP, an ally of the BJP. The other went to an independent.
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