The Election Commission on Monday announced bypolls to 13 assembly constituencies across seven states, including four in West Bengal, on July 10. The bypolls are to be held against vacancies created either due to deaths or resignation of incumbent members.

The assembly seats going for bypolls are Rupauli (Bihar), Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagda and Maniktala (all West Bengal), Vikravandi (Tamil Nadu), Amarwara (Madhya Pradesh), Badrinath and Manglaur (Uttarakhand), Jalandhar West (Punjab) and Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh (Himachal Pradesh).

The notification for the elections will be issued on June 14, the last date for filing of nomination papers is June 21, the poll papers will be scrutinised on June 24 and the last date for withdrawal of nomination papers is June 26. The bypolls will be held on July 10 and the counting of votes will be on July 13. The Election Commission said the bypolls have to be completed before July 15.

The bypoll to the Jalandhar West assembly constituency was necessitated by the resignation of Sheetal Angural. Angural was AAP's Jalandhar West (SC) lawmaker. He resigned from the assembly on March 28, a day after he and then-Jalandhar MP Sushil Rinku switched over to the BJP from AAP. During the 2022 assembly polls, Angural defeated Rinku, who was the Congress candidate, from the Jalandhar West constituency.

The Amarwara assembly seat in MP was won by Kamlesh Shah on a Congress ticket in the November 2023 elections when he defeated BJP nominee Monika Manmohan Shah Batti by a margin of 25,086 votes. The byelection was necessitated after Kamlesh Shah, a three-time Congress MLA from Amarwara, resigned on March 29 this year and joined the ruling BJP soon after. Shah subsequently resigned from the state assembly. Historically, since 1972, the BJP has won the Amarwara (ST) seat, twice—in 1990 and 2008—while the Congress bagged it nine times. The Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP), a tribal outfit, secured this constituency once in 2003.Bypolls for three assembly seats in Himachal Pradesh represented by three Independent lawmakers who resigned from the assembly and joined the BJP. The three Independent MLAs -- Ashish Sharma (Hamirpur), Hoshiyar Singh (Dehra) and KL Thakur (Nalagarh) -- resigned from the assembly on March 22 and joined the BJP the following day.

The by-election to the Rupauli assembly seat, a part of the Purnea Lok Sabha constituency in Bihar, was necessitated following the resignation of sitting JD(U) MLA Bima Bharti, who recently switched over to the RJD and contested the Lok Sabha polls as its candidate from the Purnea seat.

The Badrinath seat in Uttarakhand fell vacant after Congress MLA Rajendra Bhandari resigned from the House in March and joined the BJP. The bypoll to the Manglaur seat was necessitated by the death of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Sarwat Karim Ansari last October.