The ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal on Monday retained both Bongaon lok Sabha and Krishnaganj Assembly seats with huge margins in the two crucial by-elections considered as acid test for the party against the backdrop of the chit fund scam and reports of growing dissension within the outfit.
Elsewhere, the AIADMK won the Srirangam Assembly seat in the vacancy caused by the unseating of Jayalalithaa in a corruption case while the TDP bagged the Tirupati seat in Andhra Pradesh. BJP won the Panaji seat and the Congress the liromoba seat in Arunachal Pradesh.
Trinamool’s Mamatabala Thakur retained the Bongaon lok Sabha constituency in North-24 Parganas, once held by her late husband Kapil Krishna Thakur, by a huge margin defeating nearest CPI(M) rival and former State Minister Debesh Das by 2.12 lakh votes. While TMC got 5.5 lakh votes against left’s 3.28 lakh the BJP’s Subrata Thakur finished a close third securing 3.14 lakh votes being the only party to have increased its share of votes.
The Trinamool’s vote share went down by about 2 per cent while the left recorded a deficit of 5 per cent from what it got in 2014. The BJP, on the other hand, got 25 per cent votes and increased its vote share by 6 per cent.
Similarly, the Trinamool won the Krishnaganj Assembly seat in Nadia district, but here also the BJP increased its vote share by about 15 per cent finishing in second place displacing the left Front. While Trinamool got 95,469 votes and the BJP secured 58,436 the State’s erstwhile rulers left managed to get only 37,620 votes. The elections were held on Friday.
The by-poll results are likely to impact the civic polls for 80 municipalities scheduled to be held a few months from now. Reacting to result, BJP State president Rahul Sinha said the by-polls were a trendsetter for next year’s Assembly elections when the contest will be between the Trinamool and the BJP and all other parties including the left would become irrelevant.
“Anyone voting for the CPI(M) will in fact be wasting one’s vote as in 2016 the fight will be directly between the TMC and the BJP. The BJP is the only party which has increased its vote share in this election. The BJP was fast coming up as the only alternative of the Trinamool Congress in Bengal,” he said.
However, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said: “The election results were the people’s answer to the conspiracies being hatched against our party by the BJP and a section of the media.”
In Tamil Nadu, the ruling AIADMK won the Srirangam bye-election with a record margin of more than 96,000 votes. The party candidate S Valarmathi was declared elected from Srirangam trouncing the opposition candidates which included DMK’s S Anand, BJP’s M Subramanian and the CPI(M)’s Annadurai.
The only point of interest in the by-election was whether the AIADMK candidate would get a majority bigger than what party general secretary Jayalalithaa got from here in the 2011 Assembly election. That issue was settled by 12 50 pm when Valarmathi overtook the figure of 41,800, the majority with which Jayalalithaa won in 2011.
In Goa, the ruling BJP won the Panaji seat, which was held by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar since 1994. BJP candidate Siddharth Kunkolienkar won the by-election by a margin of 5,368 votes defeating his immediate rival and Congress nominee Surendra Furtado.
Congress retained the liromoba Assembly seat in Arunachal Pradesh with its candidate Nyamar Karbak defeating his BJP rival by a slender margin of 119 votes. Riding on a sympathy wave, TDP nominee M Suguna won the by-election to Tirupati constituency by a massive margin of over one lakh votes. The bypoll was necessitated due to the death of Suguna’s husband and TDP MlA M Venkataramana last December.
While YSR Congress did not contest the elections, the misery of Congress, still smarting under the rout of last year’s elections, went up when its nominee R Sridevi lost the security deposit.