INDIA bloc wins 3 seats in Assembly bypolls, leading in 8

New Delhi: As votes were tabulated on Saturday for the by-elections held earlier this week, patterns on the EC website showed that the INDIA bloc parties had won three assembly seats and were leading on eight, while the BJP and an Independent were ahead on one each.

The candidates of the AAP, Mohinder Bhagat won the Jalandhar West seat in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu's wife and Congress candidate Kamlesh Thakur won in Dehra and TMC's Krishna Kalyani in West Bengal's Raiganj.

The Congress, Trinamool Congress (TMC), AAP and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) are the INDIA bloc parties that fielded candidates in the by-polls held on Wednesday in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu.

In Punjab, Bhagat won the Jalandhar West seat by defeating his nearest rival and BJP nominee Sheetal Angural by a margin of 37,325 votes, the Election Commission (EC) said.

The seat fell vacant after Angural resigned as the AAP legislator and joined the BJP in March.

In Tamil Nadu, DMK's Anniyur Siva was ahead of PMK's Anbumani C by 39,435 votes in the Vikravandi assembly seat, the website showed.

TMC's Kalyani defeated BJP's Manas Kumar Ghosh by a margin of 50,077 votes to win the Raiganj assembly seat, one of the four constituencies where bypolls were held in West Bengal.

The party's other candidates Mukut Nami Adhikari, Madhuparna Tahkur and Supti Pandey are in the lead in Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagda and Maniktala. In Ranaghat Dakshin, the BJP is trailing by 31,737 votes; in Bagda by 33,455 votes and in Maniktala by 34,865 votes, according to the EC website.

In Himachal Pradesh, Congress' Kamlesh Thakur defeated BJP's Hoshiyar Singh by a margin of 9,399 votes to win the Dehra assembly seat.

In the other two seats where bypolls were held in the state -- Congress' Hardeep Singh Bawa is in the lead in Nalagarh and BJP's Ashish Sharma in Hamirpur.

In Hamirpur, Congress' Pushpinder Verma was trailing by 1,571 votes against Sharma while Bawa was leading with 8,990 votes against BJP's K L Thakur in Nalagarh, according to the website.

The Congress' candidates for the Badrinath and Manglaur bypolls -- Lakhpat Singh Butola and Qazi Nizamuddin -- in Uttarakhand were leading in both seats, according to the poll panel.

BJP's Rajendra Bhandari was trailing by 4,196 votes in Badrinath, while in Manglaur, BJP's Kartar Singh Bhadana was in second spot and BSP's Ubaidur Rahman at third.

In Madhya Pradesh's Amarwar seat, Congress' Dheeran Shah Invati was ahead of BJP's Kamslesh Pratap Shahi by 2,069 votes, while in Bihar, JD(U)'s Kaladhar Prasad Mandal was trailing by 5,069 votes against Independent candidate Shankar Singh, the EC website showed.

With PTI inputs