Uttarakhand byelection: Congress wins Manglaur seat, retains Badrinath

Dehradun, July 13

The Congress on Saturday won both the assembly seats in Uttarakhand where bypolls were held, snatching the Manglaur constituency from BSP and retaining Badrinath by defeating BJP.

Congress’ Qazi Mohammad Nizamuddin won the seat for the fourth time edging out BJP’s Kartar Singh Bhadana by a narrow margin of 422 votes. Nizamuddin won the seat twice on a BSP ticket and once on a Congress ticket in the past.

BSP, which had won the seat in the 2022 assembly polls, was relegated to the third position.

Ubaidur Rahman, the son of former BSP MLA Sarwat Karim Ansari, whose death last October necessitated the bypoll, got 19,559 votes against Nizamuddin’s 31,727 votes and Bhadana’s 31,305 votes.

The Congress’ victory in Manglaur takes the number of its MLAs in the 70-member Uttarakhand Assembly from 19 to 20.

The Congress held the Badrinath seat where Rajendra Bhandari had defeated state BJP president Mahendra Bhatt in 2022.

BJP was hoping to end the opposition monopoly in Manglaur this time but could only give a good fight to the Congress as it finished a close second with more than 31,000 votes in the Muslim-dominated seat.

The Manglaur seat has always been won either by the Congress or BSP while before this bypoll, BJP had been at the third or fourth spot.

Reacting to his victory, Nizamuddin thanked the people of the constituency for reposing faith in the Congress.

“It is the victory of ‘loktantra’ over ‘latthatantra’,” he said, referring to the violence that broke out on the day of polling at a booth in Libbarhedi in Manglaur which left four workers of a political party injured.

Former Chief Minister and Congress leader Harish Rawat thanked the voters for not succumbing to the ruling BJP’s “pressure” and choosing the Congress.

“I feel very excited. I thank the people of Manglaur for not coming under the pressures of all sorts mounted on them by the party in power and listening to their heart,” Rawat said.

Soon after the poll results were declared, several Congress workers came out on the streets as they danced with the party flag.

In the 2002 assembly polls, Nizamuddin won the seat on a BSP ticket, defeating Sarwat Karim Ansari, who was then with the Congress.

Nizamuddin won the seat on a BSP ticket in 2007, defeating Chaudhry Kulbir of the Rashtriya Lok Dal and pushing Ansari to the third position and BJP to the fourth.

In 2012, Nizamuddin switched to the Congress and Ansari to BSP.

Ansari won the Manglaur seat for the first time in 2012 but Nizamuddin wrested it in 2017. Ansari won the seat again in 2022, defeating Nizamuddin by a slender margin of 600 votes.

Ansari’s son Ubaidur Rahman was fielded by BSP this time in the hopes of getting sympathy votes following the death of his father who was the sitting MLA from Manglaur. However, the strategy did not produce the desired results.

BJP’s gamble on Gujjar leader Bhadana — who has been an MLA in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and labelled an “outsider” by his opponents — also did not pay off.

In Badrinath too, Congress’ Lakhapat Butola, a relative newcomer who contested from an assembly seat for the first time in the bypoll, scored an upset victory over former minister and MLA Rajendra Bhandari of BJP whose resignation as an MLA just before the Lok Sabha polls had necessitated a bypoll to the seat.

Butola defeated Bhandari by 5,224 votes.

In the poll held on July 10, a total of 54,228 votes were cast, out of which, 28,161 votes went to the Congress, while BJP got 22,937 votes.