The most keenly watched contest was in Munugode meeting seat in Telangana, the place Congress MLA Okay Raj Gopal Reddy had resigned and joined the BJP, forcing the bypoll and triggering a showdown between the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (renamed Bharat Rashtra Samithi) and the BJP. Surviving an preliminary scare by the BJP, TRS’s Okay Prabhakar Reddy received, however the BJP got here second.

The Congress was worn out, with its candidate, Palvai Sravanthi Reddy, failing to avoid wasting her deposit. Significantly, the Bharat Jodo Yatra led by Rahul Gandhi was in Telangana and the occasion had claimed large help within the state.

The TRS and BJP had pulled out all of the stops to win the bypoll, with the high-decibel marketing campaign finally ending in an unprecedented 93 per cent polling. The counting of votes was a see-saw affair, with the TRS and BJP buying and selling leads. It was solely after the fifth spherical that the TRS began pulling forward.

At the tip of counting, the tally stood at 97,006 votes for the TRS, 86,697 for the BJP and 23,906 for the Congress.

Having misplaced two of three bypolls within the final two years to the BJP, the Munugode win will likely be a aid for the TRS forward of subsequent yr’s meeting elections. Its tie-up with the Left events, and the diversion of a few of the votes Raj Gopal Reddy received final time to the Congress and BSP, helped the TRS. The BSP’s A Sankara Chari polled 4,146 votes.

However, the breather will likely be short-lived because the outcomes are a transparent indicator that the TRS — which is planning an bold nationwide leap — can not take the BJP with no consideration within the state. The TRS had deployed 14 state ministers and not less than 50-60 MLAs to cowl Munugode, and spotlight the state’s “national role model” schemes.

The collapse of the Congress was telling, as Raj Gopal Reddy had, in 2018, bagged 99,239 votes — 35,000-plus greater than the TRS’s Prabhakar Reddy — regardless of a TRS sweep within the state. The BJP’s Manohar Reddy had polled simply 12,725 votes then.

The Maharashtra consequence was not a shock. Rutuja Latke, the Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray candidate received the Andheri (East) meeting bypoll by an enormous margin, getting nearly 77 per cent of the whole votes polled. The BJP had withdrawn its candidate, giving Latke, the spouse of late Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Latke, a digital walkover.

However, what was attention-grabbing was the votes polled by NOTA. While Latke’s nearest rival Rajesh Tripathi polled just one,571 votes (1.8%), the None Of The Above (NOTA) choice received 12,806 votes (14.8%).

The different high-profile contest was in Haryana the place Kuldeep Bishnoi’s exit from the Congress had necessitated a bypoll in his household bastion of Adampur. Bishnoi is the son of former Haryana Chief Minister Bhajan Lal and his household has held sway over the constituency since 1968.

Bishnoi’s son Bhavya Bishnoi, 29, received on a BJP ticket by a margin of over 15,000 votes. Kuldeep, a two-time MP and four-time MLA, had stop the Congress and joined the BJP in August.

The Congress’s Jai Prakash polled 51,752 votes, adopted by INLD’s Kurdaram Nambardar with 5,248 votes, and AAP’s Satender Singh with 3,420 votes.

In Bihar, the BJP retained Gopalganj whereas the RJD managed to retain Mokama, however each events noticed diminished victory margins. The BJP was up in opposition to a formidable social mixture of the grand alliance led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

While the victory margin in Mokama for RJD candidate Neelam Devi, spouse of former MLA Anant Singh, was right down to lower than 17,000, BJP’s Kusum Devi, spouse of former MLA Subhash Singh, received the Gopalganj seat by simply 1,794 votes.

Mokama bypoll was necessitated after RJD MLA Anant Singh misplaced his Assembly membership following his conviction in an Arms Act case lately. A stronghold of his household, the victory of his spouse was a foregone conclusion, and the election was all in regards to the margin of victory. Anant had received the seat in 2020 by over 35,000 votes.

In Gopalganj, Kusum Devi managed to defeat RJD-JD(U)-Congress’s Mohan Prasad Gupta. In 2020, BSP’s Anirudh Prasad, aka Sadhu Yadav, had come second with 40,000-odd votes, however this time his spouse Indira Yadav got here a distant third with solely 8,854 votes. Interestingly, the AIMIM candidate received over 12,000 votes.

The BSP and AIMIM candidates collectively secured over 20,000 votes, which the RJD alliance claimed not directly helped the BJP.

In Uttar Pradesh, BJP’s Aman Giri defeated SP’s Vinay Tiwari by a margin of 34,298 votes in Gola Gokarannath meeting seat in Lakhimpur Kheri district. The victory has come as a morale booster for the BJP forward of the Mainpuri Lok Sabha and Rampur meeting bypolls.

Aman Giri (26), who made his political debut, noticed an even bigger profitable margin than his father Arvind Giri (29,294 votes), whose loss of life had necessitated the bypoll.

In Odisha, the BJP retained the Dhamnagar meeting seat, defeating the ruling BJD by over 9,800 votes. This is the primary time because the 2019 meeting elections that the BJD has misplaced a bypoll within the state.

The bypoll was necessitated by the loss of life of BJP MLA Bishnu Charan Sethi in September. Sethi’s son Suryabanshi Suraj, who was the occasion’s candidate, secured 80,351 votes, whereas BJD’s Abanti Das bagged 70,470 votes. Congress nominee Baba Harekrushna Sethi received solely 3,561 votes.