New Delhi: The results of elections in seven assembly seats across six states will be declared today. Prestige battles are being fought in Bihar and Telangana, and a family legacy is on the line in Haryana.
Of the seven seats, the BJP held three, the Congress two, while the Shiv Sena and the RJD had one each before bypolls were necessitated. Two of these seats are in Bihar, and one each in UP, Haryana, Maharashtra, Telangana and Odisha.
In Odisha’s Dhamnagar, the ruling regional party BJD is facing the BJP. The BJP won it last time but MLA Bishnu Charan Sethi’s death led to this contest. It has fielded his son.
Bihar is seeing the first contest – on two seats – since Nitish Kumar dumped the BJP to revive the JDU’s alliance with Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD. In Mokama, RJD’s Neelam Devi will look to retain the seat earlier held by her husband Anant Singh, a strongman-politician disqualified after being convicted of illegally keeping guns.
On Bihar’s other seat, Gopalganj, the RJD is hoping to oust the BJP which has held it for nearly two decades now. It has put up Mohan Prasad Gupta, from among the older party cadre, against the BJP’s Kusum Devi, whose husband Subhas Singh’s death necessitated the election.
In Haryana, former chief minister Bhajan Lal’s family seat Adampur will decide whether his grandson Bhavya Bishnoi can carry the 68-year legacy forward after switching from the Congress to BJP. Bhavya’s father Kuldeep Bishnoi, who led the family into the BJP, resigned as Adampur MLA as he defected, leading to this bypoll.
