- Polling for the Assembly byelections was held in 13 Assembly seats across seven states: Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh on July 10.
- The Assembly seats that went to polls were Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagda and Maniktala in West Bengal; Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh in Himachal Pradesh; Badrinath and Manglaur in Uttarakhand; Jalandhar West in Punjab; Rupauli in Bihar; Vikravandi in Tamil Nadu and Amarwara in Madhya Pradesh. Four of these states are ruled by INDIA bloc constituents while the rest have a BJP or NDA government.
- In West Bengal, the stakes are high for both the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress and the BJP. The ruling party won the Maniktala seat in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections while the BJP won Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, and Bagda. Later, the BJP MLAs switched to the Trinamool.
- The electoral exercise in Himachal Pradesh will decide the fate of many veterans and some debutants, including Chief Minister and Congress leader Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh Thakur from the Dehra constituency.
- In Uttarakhand, the Manglaur constituency is witnessing a three-cornered fight in the bypoll, which was held after the death of BSP MLA Sarwat Karim Ansari in October last year. The BJP has never won the Muslim- and Dalit-dominated Manglaur seat which has been held either by the Congress or the BSP so far.
- The bypoll in Punjab’s Jalandhar West assembly segment is being seen as a litmus test for Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Bhagwant Mann.
- The Bihar byelection was necessitated by the resignation of sitting MLA Bima Bharti, who had won the seat for Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) several times in the past but quit the party recently to contest Lok Sabha elections on an RJD ticket.
- In Tamil Nadu’s Vikravandi assembly constituency, the bypoll was necessitated by the death of DMK legislator N Pughazhendhi on April 6. It is a triangular contest with ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s candidate Anniyur Siva (alias Sivashanmugam A) pitted against Pattali Makkal Katchi’s (PMK) C Anbumani and Naam Tamilar Katchi’s K Abinaya.
- The by-election in the Amarwara assembly seat in Madhya Pradesh Chhindwara district was held after three-time Congress MLA Kamlesh Shah crossed over to the BJP in March. The main contest in this Scheduled Tribes-reserved seat is between the BJP, which fielded Kamlesh Shah, the Congress’s Dheeran Shah Invati, and Gondwana Gantantra Party’s (GGP) Devraman Bhalavi.
- These bypolls were the first since the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, which saw the BJP winning 240 seats – 32 short of the majority. The NDA, however, managed to cross the halfway mark of 272 with a total tally of 293 seats. The Congress-led INDIA bloc clinched 232 seats.
(With agency inputs)
