LUCKNOW/PATNA/BHUBANESWAR: Away from the big-ticket Gujarat elections, one-off prestige battles and popularity tests will be held Monday in bypolls to one Lok Sabha constituency and six assembly seats spread across UP, Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
Battle lines were drawn in UP where the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party will face the crucial test of saving its bastions of Mainpuri Lok Sabha and Rampur assembly seats from a combative BJP.
The late SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav was Mainpuri MP since 2004, except when he relinquished it to retain Azamgarh in 2014. His daughter-in-law and Akhilesh’s wife Dimple Yadav will take on BJP’s Raghuraj Singh Shakya, an SP turncoat, in a direct contest between SP and BJP. Congress and BSP are not in the fray.
BJP will seek to retain Khatauli where bypolls were announced following the disqualification of party MLA Vikram Saini for his alleged involvement in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. Another high-stakes battle will play out in Odisha’s Padampur assembly bypolls, where CM Naveen Patnaik’s BJD is going the extra mile to retain the seat and stave off BJP’s challenge.
In Bihar, the Kurhani assembly bypolls will be the first electoral battle between CM Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and BJP after the two parted ways four months ago. Rajasthan too will see a prestige battle in the Sardarshahar assembly bypolls. Monday’s sixth byelection will be in the Maoist-hit Bhanupratappur assembly constituency of Chhattisgarh—a reserved seat for scheduled tribes.
With agency inputs
