Lotus fails to bloom in Sikkim

NEW DELHI: The BJP contested in 31 assembly seats but failed to win a single one in Sikkim where it had 12 members in the outgoing House.

The results of the Sikkim Assembly were announced on Sunday with the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha returning to power by winning 31 of the 32 seats.

The BJP could secure only 5.18 per cent of the votes in the Himalayan state. The SKM got 58.38 per cent votes while the Sikkim Democratic Front bagged 27.37 per cent votes.

Sikkim BJP president Dilli Ram Thapa lost to SKM nominee Kala Rai in the Upper Burtuk assembly constituency.

Thapa, a sitting MLA and a former minister lost to Rai by 2,968 votes.

Rai polled 6,723 votes while Thapa got 3,755. Sikkim Democratic Front's DB Thapa polled 1,623 votes, while BK Tamang (CAP-A) bagged 581 votes.

The BJP contested in 31 Assembly seats except in the Lachen Mangan seat and in most of the seats the saffron party candidates lost their security deposits.

The saffron party decided to go alone in the Sikkim Assembly polls after severing its alliance with the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) led by Chief Minister Prem Singh Tamang after the seat-sharing talks broke down on the latter's reluctance to meet the BJP's demand for a respectable number of seats.

The BJP had 12 MLAs in the outgoing Sikkim Assembly with ten of them being defectors from the opposition Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF), while two others had won assembly bypolls held in October 2019 in alliance with the SKM.

Five of those 12 MLAs have deserted the party with three of them joining the SKM and contesting the assembly elections on the SKM symbol.

Of the remaining seven BJP MLAs, only two got tickets to contest the assembly polls.

The BJP's electoral track record in Sikkim till the 2019 assembly polls has been abysmal.

The saffron party had made a foray into electoral politics of Sikkim in 1994 by contesting three seats and losing security deposit in all three seats.