Polling for four assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Meghalaya is being held today along with voting for one Lok Sabha seat in Punjab.
Voting has begun in the assembly seats of Suar and Chhanbey in Uttar Pradesh, Jharsuguda in Odisha, and Sohiong in Meghalaya. Polling in Punjab’s Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat will start at 8 am.
The Jalandhar seat fell vacant after the death of Congress MP Santokh Singh Chaudhary. He suffered a cardiac arrest during the party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in Jalandhar’s Phillaur in January this year. The seat is expected to witness a four-cornered contest with the AAP, BJP, Congress, and Shiromani Akali Dal vying to outdo each other in the Dalit stronghold.
Prominent among those in the fray are Congress’ Karamjit Kaur, the wife of Santokh Chaudhary, ex-MLA Sushil Rinku, who quit the Congress to join the BJP, and Inder Iqbal Singh Atwal, a Dalit Sikh, who quit the Shiromani Akali Dal to join the saffron party.
In Uttar Pradesh’s Suar and Chhanbey seats, there is a faceoff between the ruling coalition and the opposition Samajwadi Party. Though the results will have no precipitative impact on the constitution of the assembly, it will be a morale booster for the victor before the Lok Sabha poll next year.
The Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party has decided to not contest the by-elections, while the Congress has fielded its candidate only in Chhanbey.
In Meghalaya, polling is underway in Sohiong, where a bypoll was necessitated due to the death of UDP candidate HDR Lyngdoh ahead of the assembly elections held in the rest of the state on February 27. Polling to Sohiong was then postponed due to Lyngdoh’s death.