New Delhi . The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got one Lok Sabha seat and suffered a crushing defeat in four assembly constituencies in the bypolls announced on Saturday. Former Union Minister and Trinamool Congress candidate Shatrughan Sinha won the Asansol Lok Sabha seat in West Bengal by a margin of over 3 lakh votes.
Former minister in Narendra Modi government and Trinamool Congress candidate Babul Supriyo won from Ballygunge assembly constituency.
Of the Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies where polling was held, only one Asansol seat was won by the BJP in the last elections.
Supriyo won the Asansol Lok Sabha seat twice in 2014 and 2019 and was made a minister of state in the Narendra Modi government.
Supriyo was dropped from the Union Council of Ministers during a cabinet reshuffle in July last year.
He later resigned from BJP and Lok Sabha to join Trinamool Congress.
Actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha defeated Agnimitra Paul of BJP. Sinha started his political career with the BJP and left the party to join the Congress before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He later joined Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.
Last month, West Bengal Chief Minister Banerjee had declared Sinha as the Trinamool Congress candidate.
The bypoll for Asansol was necessitated after Supriyo resigned to join the Trinamool Congress last year.
Trinamool has fielded Supriyo from Ballygunge assembly constituency, defeating BJP’s Kiya Ghosh and CPI(M)’s Saira Shah Haleem.
Ballygunge assembly by-election had to be held after the death of West Bengal minister Subrata Mukherjee.
In Bochahan Assembly Constituency, Opposition RJD candidate Amar Kumar Paswan defeated BJP’s Baby Kumari by over 36,000 votes.
The Congress won one each in the two assembly constituencies in Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra.
Congress candidate from Kolhapur North in Maharashtra Jayshree Chandrakant Jadhav defeated BJP’s Satyajit Kadam by over 19,000 votes.
Yashoda Nilambar Verma of Congress won from Khairagarh in Chhattisgarh.
The BJP, which maintained its lead in the recent assembly elections in four of the five states, has suffered a setback with the bypoll results.
A senior BJP functionary said, “Except in Bihar where the party is in power, the results are on expected lines. In Asansol, we have lost the seat we won twice. The leadership will review the results in the coming days.”
—AnyTV News
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