BJP fails to win a single seat in by-elections across four states, ceding Asansol LS constituency to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in Bengal, finishing third behind CPM in the battle for the Ballygunge assembly segment and losing by big margins in Chhattisgarh’s Khairagarh, Bihar’s Bochaha and Maharashtra’s Kolhapur North.
Trinamool won the Asansol test for the first time through its new celebrity recruit Shatrughan Sinha, whose victory by a margin of more than 300,000 votes harked back to his cult status in the coal belt after his turn as Mangal Singh in the 1979 blockbuster ‘Kaala Patthar.’ BJP candidate Agnimitra Paul lost even on her home turf Asansol (South), which had elected her to the assembly less than a year ago. BJP won in six of the seven assembly segments. TMC’s seat count in the Lok Sabha now stands at 23.
Ex-BJP MP and Union minister of state Babul Supriyo, who joined Mamata after quitting the saffron party last September and the Asansol seat a month later, made a successful assembly debut, defeating CPM’s Saira Shah Halim in Ballygunge by alittle over 20,000 votes. BJP’s Keya Ghosh was a distant third, getting less than half the votes the runner-up got in keeping with the trend seen in the urban local body polls earlier this year.
In Bihar, RJD’s Amar Kumar Paswan defeated BJP nominee Baby Kumari by 36,000-odd votes in the Bochaha assembly bypoll. While Paswan secured 48.5% of the votes polled, Baby got 26.9. Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) candidate Geeta Kumari, daughter of former minister and nine-time MLA Ramai Ram, finished third.
The bypoll was necessitated by the death of VIP MLA Musafir Paswan, father of winning candidate Amar. The Mukesh Sahani-led VIP was part of NDA in Bihar until the party chief spoke out against the saffron party and fielded candidates on his own in the UP assembly polls. BJP got all 3VIP MLAs to merge with it and then ensured Sahani’s ouster from the Nitish Kumar government.
