E-Paper
D-day for 58 assembly seats across 11 states
Stakes high for the ruling BJP and the Congress in MP, with the former needing to win eight seats to retain majority.
Along with a pitched battle for the Bihar state elections between the National Democratic Alliance and the Opposition Grand Alliance, or Mahagathbandhan, votes will be counted on Tuesday for 58 assembly seats across 11 states, with Madhya Pradesh accounting for nearly half of them, as India ends its first major electoral exercise during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The only Lok Sabha seat to be decided is this round of polling is Bihar’s Valmiki Nagar, where an election was necessitated after the death in February of Janata Dal (United) MP Baidyanath Mahto.
Counting will begin at 8 am with social distancing norms at all counting centres, according to the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The stakes are high for the ruling BJP and the Congress in Madhya Pradesh, with the former needing to win at least eight seats (out of the 28 going to the polls) to retain a simple majority in the state assembly. The BJP, at the moment, has 107 MLAs in a House with an effective strength of 202.
The halfway mark after the bypolls will be 115. The Congress, which lost 25 sitting MLAs when they walked out of the party with Jyotiraditya Scindia in March a show of support, has 87 seats. The shift toppled the Kamal Nath government and brought Shivraj Singh Chouhan back to power as chief minister.
In Uttar Pradesh, the bypolls will a test of popularity for the Yogi Adityanath government, as the BJP, which has a comfortable majority in the state assembly, is contesting on seven seats -- six of which it won in the 2017 elections; one of the seats up for grabs was held by the Samajwadi Party.
The counting of votes will also take place in eight seats in Gujarat, four in Manipur, and one in Haryana -- all held by the Congress. The elections to the Gujarat seats were needed after eight Congress MLAs resigned during the Rajya Sabha polls in June.
The by-elections were necessitated in Manipur after Congress MLAs in the four seats resigned from the assembly, quit the party, and switched to the BJP. If the BJP wins all four seats, it will get a majority on its own in the 60-member house.
The fate will also be decided of one seat in Chhattisgarh, two in Jharkhand, and two in Karnataka. None of these elections will have an impact on the status of the state assemblies. But Chhattisgarh’s Marwahi seat, where polls was necessitated due to the death of sitting Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (J) MLA and former CM Ajit Jogi in May, is particularly interesting because there is a direct fight between the Congress and the BJP after the nomination of Jogi’s son Amit and daughter-in-law Richa Jogi were rejected on the grounds that their caste papers were not in order. The Marwahi seat is reserved for Scheduled Tribes.
There are another two seats in Nagaland, one in Telangana, and two in Odisha to be decided on Tuesday.
(With agency inputs)
