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Vijaya Pushkarna
Vijaya Pushkarna

BYPOLLS

BJP makes impressive gains, big blow for AAP

PTI4_13_2017_000125A BJP President Amit Shah greets BJP-SADjoint candidate Manjinder Singh Sirsa for his victory in the Rajouri Garden bypoll | PTI

A month short of completing three years in office, and the Modi-Shah duo leading the BJP's government and organisational wing respectively, have hit the half way mark. The party has won  five of the ten assembly seats to which byelections were held in eight different states. The Congress has won three, while the Trinamool Congress and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha bagged one each.

But the BJP is not seeing five out of ten as anything to worry about. Coming within a month of forming government in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarkhand, Manipur and Goa, the  party is ecstatic about the results. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a tweet, saw it as an impressive performance by the BJP and NDA in different parts of the country, and thanked the people for the constant support, blessings and “unwavering faith in politics of development and good governance”.

From Assam in the North East, to the Hindi heartland of Madhya Pradesh to the Himalayan Himachal Pradesh, the saffron party has retained its hold sufficiently to say that their magic has not jaded one bit. 

The biggest victory must, without a doubt, be the Rajouri Gardens constituency in the National Capital territory. The victory of the Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP candidate Manjinder Singh Sirsa has made the BJP's threesome into a foursome, to confront Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his AAP. The BJP's joy is more because it is a defeat for the AAP right in the city-state where it has a government, coming close on the heals of the party's dreams of forming government in Punjab and Goa crumbling. The AAP candidate even lost his deposit!

The other four seats the party won comprise Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje's home turf, Dholpur, Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh, Dhemaji in Assam and Bhoranj in Himachal Pradesh.

Raje, who spent time in her home town and showered promises that are usually not part of a byelection campaign, has reasons to rejoice. Her state is due to go to polls by the end of 2018, and this victory could be indication of things to come, and in a way, reason to believe that the people of Rajasthan are not disenchanted with her government. 

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister  Shivraj Singh Chauhan who is into his third continuous term in office has won one—Bandhavgarh—and lost one, Ater. But Chauhan can console himself-- the BJP candidate Arvind Singh Bhadoria polled 47.31 per cent of the votes, while the winning Congress candidate Hemant Katare, 48.01 per cent, winning by a cat's whisker as it were. 

Three of these five seats that the BJP won, have in fact been retained, while two have been wrested—one from the Congress and one from the BSP.

But voters of Nanjangud and Gundulpet in Karnataka have not supported the BJP, and voted the Congress, showing that the BJP's “congress-mukt bharat” dream is still an uphill task in the state that goes to assembly elections next year. Inviting into the party fold lifelong Congressman and former chief minister S.M. Krishna has apparently not made the difference that the BJP expected.

In West Bengal, Trinamool Congress candidate Chandrima Bhattacharya won the Kanthi Dakshin seat garnering 24.92 per cent more votes than the BJP, demonstrating that the state is still Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's territory.

Manishs Sisodia, the AAP leader and the deputy chief minister of Delhi, reacted to the elections results saying, “ We need to revisit people connect”.

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Topics : #BJP | #elections

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