EC announces by-elections to 4 Assembly seats in Bengal
The Election Commission of India today (June 10) announced by-elections to four Assembly seats in Bengal, along with nine others in six states. The elections will be held on July 10.
The four in Bengal are Bagda, Maniktala, Raiganj and Ranaghat Dakshin.
One of the seats, Maniktala in Kolkata, fell vacant after the incumbent, All India Trinamool Congress’s AITC) Sadhan Pande died, while the other three are up for elections because the MLAs occupying those seats shifted loyalties from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the AITC.
Interestingly, the winning MLAs from all these three seats—Biswajit Das from Bagda, Krishna Kalyani from Raiganj and Mukut Mani Adhikari from Ranaghat Dakshin—fought in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections and lost to colleagues from their earlier party.
While Biswajit Das lost the Bangaon Lok Sabha seat to Shantanu Thakur (the sitting MP), Krishna Kalyani lost the Raiganj seat to Kartik Paul and Mukut Mani Adhikari lost the Ranaghat seat to Jagannath Sarkar (also the sitting MP).
The nine other seats going to the polls on July 10 are Rupauli (Bihar), Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh (Himachal Pradesh), Amarwara (Madhya Pradesh), Jalandhar West (Punjab), Vikravandi (Tamil Nadu), and Badrinath and Manglaur (Uttarakhand).
Six other Assembly seats in Bengal will also see by-elections in the coming months as the MLAs from those seats have been elected to the Lok Sabha—Haroa (Haji Sheikh Nurul Islam of the AITC won from Basirhat), Madarihat (Manoj Tigga of the BJP won from Alipurduars), Medinipur (June Maliah of the AITC won from Medinipur), Naihati (Partha Bhowmick of the AITC won from Barrackpur), Sitai (Jagadish Chandra Basunia of the AITC won from Coochbehar) and Taldangra (Arup Chakraborty of the AITC won from Bankura).
