Voting commenced at 7am on Tuesday in 10 states for bypolls to 54 Assembly seats.
The states where the bypolls are being held are Madhya Pradesh (28 seats), Gujarat (8), Uttar Pradesh (7), Karnataka (2), Odisha (2), Jharkhand (2), Nagaland (2), Telangana (1), Chhattisgarh (1) and Haryana (1).
The votes cast in these bypolls will be counted on November 10, along with the counting of votes in the Bihar Assembly elections.
Madhya Pradesh
Not surprisingly, the bypolls in Madhya Pradesh are the most important in terms of political impact as it could affect the stability of the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government there. Chouhan became chief minister in March after 22 MLAs of the ruling Congress resigned and switched over to the BJP, reducing the Kamal Nath dispensation to a minority.
Three more Congress MLAs followed suit and joined the BJP after Shivraj returned to power. Another three seats in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly fell vacant after the deaths of the incumbent MLAs.
The BJP currently has 107 MLAs, while the Congress has 87 legislators in the House. Congress MLAs who quit from the 25 seats are now in the fray as BJP candidates.
Gujarat
The elections in Gujarat, while not having an immediate impact on the stability of the BJP government in the state, were also necessitated by Congress MLAs switching over to the ruling party.
Polling is being held in Abdasa (Kutch district), Limbdi (Surendranagar), Morbi (Morbi district),
Dhari (Amreli), Gadhada (Botad), Karjan (Vadodara), Dang (Dang district) and Kaprada (Valsad).
The bypolls were necessitated after Congress MLAs there resigned ahead of Rajya Sabha polls in June this year. Five of them joined the ruling BJP and the party has fielded them from the seats that they won in 2017.
The five are Brijesh Merja (Morbi), Akshay Patel (Karjan), Jitu Chaudhary (Kaprada), Pradyumansinh Jadeja (Abdasa) and J.V. Kakadiya (Dhari).
The other three BJP candidates are Atmaram Parmar (Gadhada), Vijay Patel (Dang) and Kiritsinh Rana (Limbdi). Parmar and Rana are former state ministers who lost the 2017 Assembly polls from the same seats.
