NEW DELHI: Ruling parties won assembly byelections in three states, results of which were announced on Monday — BJP won two seats in Goa, AAP retained Bawana and TDP snatched the Nandyal seat from YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh.
Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar won the Panaji seat by a margin of 4,803 votes, as against his victory margin of 6,068 in the 2012 assembly elections.
State Health Minister Vishwajit Rane, who resigned as Congress MLA to join the Bharatiya Janata Party in Goa, increased his victory margin in Valpoi seat to 10,066 votes from 4,066 votes in the February elections.
Parrikar, a former Defence Minister, was sent back to Goa by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership to lead the state government after a split verdict in Goa.
Parrikar won the Panaji seat for the sixth time. He polled 9,862 votes compared with nearest rival and Congress nominee Girish Chodankar’s 5,059 votes. Anand Shirodkar of the Goa Suraksha Manch came a distant third with 220 votes.
In Valpoi, Rane got 16,167 votes as against his Congress rival Roy Naik’s 6,101 votes.
“I was expecting to win,” Parrikar told reporters after the victory. He said he would resign his Rajya Sabha seat shortly.
Chodankar said he might have lost but was touched by the manner in which Panaji voters interacted with him.
Nearly 75 per cent voting was recorded during the August 23 bypolls in Goa.
The bypoll in Panaji was necessitated by BJP MLA Sidarth Kuncolienkar’s resignation to enable Parrikar contest and become an MLA within six months of taking over as Chief Minister.
In Delhi, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) retained the Bawana seat, one of the 12 reserved seats in the 70-member assembly, by over 24,000 votes, with AAP candidate Ram Chandra defeating former party legislator Ved Prakash, who has since joined the BJP after resigning his assembly membership.
Though the party’s victory margin was less than 2015, the victory came as a booster to the party after its losses in the Rajouri assembly bypoll and municipal elections. The Congress finished third but put up a credible performance.
Ram Chandra got 59,886 votes against 35,834 votes of Ved Prakash. Congress candidate Surender Kumar got 31,919 votes.
The AAP candidate received 45.39 per cent of the total votes cast, while the BJP and Congress candidates got 27.16 and 24.19 per cent, respectively.
Congress had got only 7.87 per cent votes in the 2015 assembly polls. The vote share of both AAP and BJP came down — BJP had got 31.40 per cent votes in the 2015 elections, while the AAP had polled 57.9 per cent.
Andhra Pradesh’s ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) snatched the Nandyal seat by a huge margin.
TDP’s Bhuma Brahmananda Reddy defeated his nearest rival Silpa Mohan Reddy of YSR Congress Party by over 27,000 votes.
— IANS
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