A month after its third consecutive whitewash in a Lok Sabha election in Uttarakhand, the Congress registered a comeback in the hill state with candidates Lakhpat Singh Butola and Qazi Nizamuddin winning the Badrinath and Manglaur Assembly seats as the bypoll election results were announced on Saturday.
In Badrinath, Butola, a first-time candidate, got 27,696 votes, defeating BJP’s Rajendra Singh Bhandari by a margin of 5,095 votes, as per data on the Election Commission website. A three-term MLA and former state minister, Bhandari secured 22,601 votes. The Badrinath seat fell vacant after Bhandari quit the Congress and joined the BJP.
In Manglaur, three-time MLA and senior Congress leader Nizamuddin secured the seat by a narrow margin of 422 votes against BJP’s Kartar Singh Bhadana. While Nizamuddin secured 31,727 votes, Bhadana got 31,305 votes.
The son of former Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Sarwat Karim Ansari, whose death last October necessitated the bypoll in the seat, Ubaidur Rehman aka Monty came in the third position with 19,559 votes.
The Badrinath seat is one of the 14 Assembly segments falling under the Garhwal Lok Sabha constituency and the only one held by the Congress; the remaining belong to the BJP. While the BJP had nominated turncoat Bhandari, the Congress chose first-timer Butola. A former Chamoli Zila Panchayat president, Butola had worked as the party spokesperson for nine years and was also the party’s Garhwal Mandal media in-charge.
In Manglaur, a seat the BJP has never won since Uttarakhand’s creation as a separate state, the ruling BJP chose Bhadana, brother of noted politician Avtar Singh Bhadana. He was previously a BSP leader in Haryana and a member of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) under Om Prakash Chautala, having served as a Cabinet minister in the Chautala government in Haryana. He had also won the Khatauli Assembly seat in Uttar Pradesh as a BSP leader.
The Congress, on the other hand, picked Nizamuddin. In the 2022 Assembly elections, Nizamuddin had lost to BSP’s Sarwat Karim Ansari by a narrow margin of 598 votes.
These bypolls were crucial to the Congress, which leveraged the momentum from the recent Lok Sabha election results that strengthened the INDIA alliance, despite not winning a single seat in Uttarakhand.
