The Thursday bye-elections for three Lok Sabha and seven assembly seats in five states and one Union Territory is a popularity test for the ruling parties. For the Bharatiya Janata Party, four Assembly seats in Tripura and two Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh are crucial markers. For the Aam Aadmi Party, it is the Lok Sabha and Assembly seats in Delhi and Punjab.
In Tripura, Agartala, Town Bardowali, Surma and Jubarajnagar are the Assembly seats up for grabs; in Punjab it is the Sangrur Lok Sabha constituency; in Uttar Pradesh, two Lok Sabha seats of Azamgarh and Rampur go to polls; while in Delhi, Rajinder Nagar Assembly seat, and in Jharkhand, Mandar Assembly seat have bye-elections. Atmakur assembly seat in Andhra Pradesh also held the bye-election on Thursday.
Bye-elections for Azamgarh and Rampur Lok Sabha seats were held after Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and SP’s prominent Muslim leader Azam Khan vacated them after being elected to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly earlier this year. In both these constituencies, SP faces a tough challenge as BJP CM Yogi Adityanath attempts to conquer the SP bastions.
Tempers understandably ran high during the polls with the SP calling for the Election Commission and levelling against the BJP allegations of “wrongdoing” and “intimidation” as voting got underway.
AAP, which is projecting itself as an alternative to Narendra Modi-led BJP at the Centre ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, will have a sort-of popularity test in Sangrur, as well as Rajinder Nagar.
AAP’s Bhagwant Mann vacated his Sangrur Lok Sabha seat when his party won Punjab and he became the state Chief Minister. Delhi’s Rajinder Nagar seat opened up because its MLA Raghav Chadha resigned when he was elected to the Rajya Sabha.
In one case the MP became MLA, and in the other the MLA became MP.
Winning Sangrur is crucial for AAP, as the BJP has mounted offensive against Mann government, questioning the new chief minister’s competence, after the recent spike in violence in the state, including the murder of singer-politician Sidhu Moosewala.
In the 2020 Delhi Assembly polls, AAP won a whopping 62 seats and reduced the Congress—which ruled the capital state for 15 years—to zero. AAP was able to curtail the BJP to eight seats, despite a high-octane campaign by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
The BJP, which has led a spirited campaign in the Assembly, has been trying hard to debunk the Arvind Kerjiwal-model of governance. Both BJP and the Congress have fielded former councillors to take on AAP’s candidate, but the real contest seems to be between the BJP and AAP. Even voters suffering from Covid-19 were allowed to cast their vote in the last hour of the scheduled time.
Any loss—either in Sangrur Lok Sabha seat or Rajinder Nagar Assembly seat—can be projected by the BJP as AAP losing ground.
The BJP itself faces a litmus test in Tripura. Having changed Chief Minister—replacing Biplab Kumar Deb with Manik Saha—in May this year, the BJP seems to be preparing against anti-incumbency well ahead of the 2023 state Assembly polls.
The BJP has the challenge of winning at least three of the four Assembly seats—Agartala, Town Bardowali and Surma—that were held by it, while ensuring Manik Saha’s victory.
Agartala and Town Bardowali fell vacant after senior BJP leaders Sudip Roy Barman and Asish Saha quit and joined Congress in February this year. BJP MLA from Surma Asish Das was disqualified by the Assembly Speaker. Chief Minister Saha is contesting from Bardowali.
Similarly in Jharkhand, the ruling alliance of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and Congress is fighting to retain the Mandar assembly seat, which was vacated because Congress leader Bandhu Tirkey got disqualified after being convicted in a corruption case.
Congress has fielded Tirkey’s daughter, while the BJP is banking on the acumen of its former MLA. While Chief Minister Hemant Soren has projected Mandar by-poll as fight for ideology of “Jharkhandi and Jharkhandiyat”, the BJP is asking voters to cast their franchise against “dynastic politics and corruption”.
Counting of votes for the bypolls will be held on Sunday.