- BJP bags 4 bypolls
- Uddhav faction of Shiv Sena wins East Andheri seat
- RJD retains Mokama
In the by-election held on November 3 in Munugode in Nalgonda district of Telangana State, the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) won the seat originally held by the Congress. The sitting Congress MLA Komatireddy Rajagopal Reddy defected to the BJP and resigned making the by-election a must. Both the TRS and BJP spend huge amounts of money. People who were interviewed by TV channels after voting said each one of them was paid five thousand rupees by the TRS and four thousand rupees by the BJP.The Congress did not spend much. The Congress candidate Palavai Sravanti lost deposit. She was polled 23,926 thousand votes. TRS candidate Kusuguntla Prabhakar Reddy won by 11,666 votes. He was polled 97,006 votes while the BJP candidate got 86697 votes. Having both the Communist parties was very important for TRS. Had the Communists did not side with the TRS and has Palavai Sravanti got less than 20 thousand votes, Rajagopal Reddy would have romped home. It was a very clever move on the part of TRS to have entered into understanding with the Communists. The CPI won the seat five times earlier.
While BJP won two by-elections in Medak (Dubbaka) and Karimnagar (Huzurnagar) districts, TRS won bypolls in three constituencies (Huzurnagar, Nagarjuna Sagar and Munugode) in old Nalgonda district. Rajagopal Reddy blamed his defeat on TRS misuse of money and office by the TRS. K. Taraka Rama Rao (KTR) speaking after the counting said the people of Munugode have voted for the self-respect of Telangana. BJP’s money power and musle power did not have any effect on the people of Munugode.It was a fierecely contested election in which about 80 TRS MLAs and a dozen ministers camped in the constituency for more than two weeks. Union ministers came to campaign for the BJP candidate.
The BJP has won in Uttar Pradesh’s Gola Gokranath, Haryana’s Adampu and Odisha’s Dhamnagar. The party also retained Bihar’s Gopalganj assembly seat which is part of Lalu Prasad Yadav’s home district. The RJD on its part has retained Mokama seat. These two by-elections took place after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar shifted his allegiance from the BJP to RJD. The battles in Telangana, Haryana and Bihar were considered prestigious.
Since the general elections are only one and half years away, the regional parties have put up strong fight hinting that it is not going to be easy for the BJP if the regional parties come together on a single platform to fight the elections. TRS, RJD, SP and BJD offered good fight to the BJP. In East Andheri of Maharashtra, the BJP withdrew its candidate. In Bihar it won its seat and the RJD retained its own seat. In Telangana, the TRS has beaten BJP candidates by more than 11 thousand votes. In the last assembly elections the Congress had won Munugode and Adampur in Haryana.
