Three newly elected members of the Himachal Pradesh legislative assembly were administered the oath as legislators on Monday after they won the recent byelections.
Congress candidates Kamlesh Thakur, Hardeep Singh Bawa and BJP candidate Ashish Sharma took the oath after winning the Dehra, Nalagarh and Hamirpur seats, respectively.
Congress candidate and Himachal Pradesh chief minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh Thakur won the assembly by-election from the Dehra constituency by defeating Hoshyar Singh of the BJP.
Congress candidate Hardeep Singh Bawa won the Nalagarh assembly seat by defecating the BJP’s KL Thakur.
The only silver lining for the BJP in the assembly byelections was in Hamirpur, where its candidate Ashish Sharma won by a slender margin.
The seats fell vacant after the three Independent legislators, Hoshyar Singh from Dehra, Ashish Sharma from Hamirpur and KL Thakur from Nalagarh, who had voted in favour of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha elections on February 27, resigned from the assembly on March 22 and joined the party the next day.
{{/usCountry}}The seats fell vacant after the three Independent legislators, Hoshyar Singh from Dehra, Ashish Sharma from Hamirpur and KL Thakur from Nalagarh, who had voted in favour of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha elections on February 27, resigned from the assembly on March 22 and joined the party the next day.
{{/usCountry}}Expressing satisfaction over the bypoll results, Sukhu said, “This is the victory of people over money power. The voters have delivered rejected the politics of horse trading and have voted to maintain political integrity in the state. It had been 25 years since a Congress candidate won in Dehra. In Nalagarh, too, the candidate won by a significant margin.”
The assembly bylection results came as a setback for the BJP as the party won only two of the 13 seats, with the INDIA bloc winning 10 seats and an Independent candidate winning a seat in seven states across the country.