Tripura bypolls: BJP candidates win 2 Assembly seats with comfortable margins

AGARTALA: Candidates of the ruling BJP have won in Tripura's Dhanpur and Boxanagar Assembly constituencies defeating their CPI (M) rivals with comfortable margins, election officials said on Friday.

The BJP wrested the Boxanagar seat from the CPI-M and retained the Dhanpur seat.

The two Assembly constituencies were once strongholds of the Left parties.

Election officials said that BJP candidate Taffajal Hossain, with 34,146 votes, won in Boxanagar by a margin of 30,237 votes defeating his CPI (M) opponent Mizan Hossain, who bagged 3,909 votes only.

The saffron party nominee Bindu Debnath (30,017 votes) won the Dhanpur constituency thrashing his CPI-M challenger Kaushik Chanda 11146 votes) by a margin of 18871 votes.

Counting of votes, which began on Friday morning under tight security measures in two centres at the Sonamura Girls’ Higher Secondary school in Sepahijala district, have been completed after six rounds of calculations in both the Boxanagar and Dhanpur seats.

“After the completion of counting of postal ballots, counting of votes stored in the EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) have been taken up,” the poll officials said.

The bypolls were held on Tuesday, and the voter turnout stood at 86.56 per cent, with 93,495 eligible voters casting their ballots.

Alleging large-scale intimidation, rigging and irregularities by members and workers of the state's ruling BJP on the polling day and the Election Commission’s "inactiveness" to deal with the “terror and misdeeds”, the CPI (M)-led Left Front has boycotted the counting.

The by-election to the Dhanpur seat was necessitated after Union Minister Pratima Bhoumik resigned from the Assembly, days after she was elected from the seat as a BJP nominee in the February 16 Assembly elections.

The Muslim-dominated Boxanagar Assembly seat fell vacant after the death of sitting CPI (M) MLA Samsul Haque, who died on July 19 following a cardiac attack.

With this victory in the two assembly seats, the BJP’s tally increased to 33 in the 60-member assembly while CPI-M’s strength went down from 11 to 10.

In the February 16 assembly polls, the ruling BJP won 32 seats while its ally Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura secured one.

On the other hand the tribal based Tipra Motha Party secured 13 seats while CPI-M managed 11 seats and the Congress three.

The CPI-M and the Congress contested the February assembly polls in a seat sharing arrangement.