The BJP demolished two Samajwadi Party bastions on Sunday by wresting the Rampur and Azamgarh parliamentary seats. The BJP won both seats in the by-elections. BJP candidates Dinesh Lal Yadav “Nirahua” (Azamgarh) and Ghanshayam Singh Lodhi (Rampur) defeated SP nominees Dharmendra Yadav and Asim Raja respectively by margins of 8,679 and 42,192 votes.
UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath said that the results were a seal of approval on his working and his government. He said that the results were a vindication of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies. Rampur and Azamgarh have been considered as SP strongholds and this, being the first by elections after the March assembly elections, is a major blow to the party leadership.
Rampur and Azamgarh are the constituencies of SP’s two tallest leaders—Akhilesh Yadav and Mohd Azam Khan. Azamgarh was earlier held by SP president Akhilesh Yadav and he had resigned after winning the assembly polls in March.
However, he did not campaign in Azamgarh and this raised several questions in political circles even though Akhilesh Yadav’s cousin Dharmendra Yadav was the SP candidate.
He had also not allowed his estranged uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav to campaign in Azamgarh. In Azamgarh, the BSP successfully engineered SP’s defeat by fielding a Muslim candidate, Guddu Jamali, who walked away with over two lakh votes and allowed BJP’s Dinesh Lal Yadav Nirahua to walk home victorious.
Meanwhile, in a major upset in the Lok Sabha by-elections, the AAP on Sunday lost the Sangrur parliamentary seat vacated by Bhagwant Singh Mann when he became Punjab chief minister to SAD (Amritsar) president Simranjit Singh Mann.
Mann, 77, who returns to Parliament after two decades, defeated the Aam Aadmi Party’s Gurmail Singh by a margin of 5,822 votes. Mann polled 2,53,154 votes, while Singh got 2,47,332,
For the AAP, the humiliating defeat comes just three months after it registered a landslide victory in the 2022 assembly elections, winning 92 of the 117 assembly constituencies. CM Bhagwant Mann himself has won from Sangrur parliamentary constituency twice – in 2014 and 2019. His recent win was from Dhuri, an assembly segment in the same Lok Sabha constituency.
With regard to Assembly bypolls, in Tripura, the BJP won three out of four seats with Chief Minister Dr Manik Saha emerging victorious in his first-ever direct electoral battle from the Town Bardowali constituency. The BJP also won the Jubarajnagar and Surma seats in the Tripura bypolls. Meanwhile, the Congress party made a comeback of sorts by winning one seat and the CPM and the TMC ended with zero seats.
The Aam Aadmi Party swept the Rajinder Nagar bypolls in Delhi with a margin of around 11,000 votes. YSR Congress Party’s Mekapati Vikram Reddy won by a huge margin in Andhra Pradesh’s Atmakur, defeating the BJP candidate by a margin of 82,888 votes.
