Jaipur, Jan 31
The Congress on Thursday won the Ramgarh Assembly seat in Rajasthan, taking its tally in the 200-member house to 100.
Congress candidate Shafia Khan won by a margin of 12,228 votes after polling 83,311 votes. Her nearest rival, BJP's Sukhwant Singh, got 71,083 votes.
Jagat Singh of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) finished third with 24,856 votes.
An overjoyed Shafia Khan said: "This is a victory of the people. I congratulate the people for this victory.
"The BJP talks too much and does little. They closed the schools which we had started, they were biased in implementing the social welfare schemes and hence people wanted to come out of the polarized environment they had created.
"So people have voted unitedly for the Congress," she added.
While Shafia Khan got 44.77 per cent of all votes, the BJP's vote share was 38.20 per cent.
Overall, 241 votes went to NOTA (None of the Above).
Senior Congress leader Suresh Chaudhary told IANS: "The Congress has built its credibility amongst voters by fulfilling all its promises made in its manifesto. People in the state are fed up with the polarization prank being played by the BJP.
"This broad margin of victory speaks the story," he said.
Counting of votes was held at the Babu Shobharam Government Arts College in Alwar amid tight security, said Ramgarh Returning Officer Pankaj Sharma.
The election on this seat was scheduled on December 7 along with the rest of Rajasthan Assembly seats but was postponed after BSP candidate Laxman Singh died due to cardiac arrest.
Eventually, polling was held on January 28 with a high voter turnout.
There are 20 candidates in the fray but the main contest involved Shafia Khan, Sukhwant Singh and Jagat Singh.
The Congress aimed to win the seat to hit a century mark in the 200-member House. This win will limit its dependency on anti-BJP parties.
For a simple majority on its own, the party needs 101 seats.
BJP wins Jind Assembly seat in Haryana; Congress, INLD bite dust
Chandigarh, Jan 31
Establishing it grip on state politics just ahead of the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, Haryana's ruling BJP won the Jind Assembly seat in a multi-cornered contest on Thursday by 12,935 votes.
BJP candidate Krishan Lal Middha was declared elected after getting 50,566 votes. The winner will have a tenure of only nine months before the next Assembly polls.
This is the first time the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bagged the Jind assembly seat, making a new beginning in this "Jat" land seat.
A visibly happy Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said in Chandigarh: "People have again reposed their faith in the policies, governance and transparency of the BJP government in the state and the Centre. BJP workers worked hard."
Middha, a non-Jat candidate, is the son of two-time INLD legislator Hari Chand Middha, who passed away in August last year.
The recently launched Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) made an impressive debut in the by-election by finishing second. Its candidate, young turk Digvijay Singh Chautala, got 37,631 votes.
The Congress, which fielded a "strong candidate" in Randeep Surjewala, the party's national spokesman, finished a poor third with just 22,740 votes.
The Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), which won the Jind seat in the last two Assembly elections, fared miserably. The INLD finished fifth among leading parties, getting only 3,454 votes.
The Loktantar Suraksha Party (LSP), launched by rebel BJP MP Raj Kumar Saini, got 13,582 votes to finish at the fourth position.
Voting took place on January 28 with nearly 76 per cent of the 1.72 lakh voters exercising their franchise.
The Haryana Police and paramilitary forces used canes to disperse protesters during a demonstration in Jind town during the counting of votes.
Serial numbers of some EVMs (electronic voting machines) did not match with the list and this was objected to by the contesting candidates inside the counting centre.
As the news reached the activists of various parties, the protest started in Jind town, around 190 km from here, following which the police took action to disperse them.
The counting process was stopped for some time after the complaint regarding the EVMs but it resumed later.
Khattar said that people in Haryana will vote for the BJP and the party will win all 10 Lok Sabha seats as well as Assembly elections this year.
The by-election was important for all four major parties in the fray -- the BJP, Congress, INLD and JJP as both Lok Sabha and Assembly elections are to be held later in 2019.
