The Newz Radar Network
Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh Thakur has won the byelection from Dehra, defeating BJP’s Hoshyar Singh by 9,399 votes.
It was Kamlesh’s debut Assembly election, the polling having been conducted on July 10 and the counting of votes done on July 13. Fighting her maiden Assembly election, Kamlesh had trailed in the first four rounds, but consolidated her leads in the subsequent six rounds. There were a total of five candidates in Dehra, the other not Independent nominees Arun Ankesh Syal, Sulekha Chaudhary and Sanjay Sharma not even touching the 200 votes mark. Sulekha got 171 votes, Arun 67 and Sanjay 43. NOTA polled 150 votes.
Winning candidate Kamlesh Kamlesh Thakur got 32,737 votes against 23,338 for Hoshyar Singh.
In Hamirpur, BJP’s Ashish Sharma defeated Congress candidate Dr Pushpinder Verma by 1,433 votes.
In Nalagarh, where the counting is learnt to have started 50 minutes late, Congress nominee Hardeep Singh Bawa has been ahead against BJP’s KL Thakur since the first round. After the completion of eight of the total nine rounds, Hardeep Bawa was ahead by 6,870 votes.
The byelections were necessitated after Independent MLAs Hoshyar Singh, Ashish Sharma and KL Thakur had resigned from their Assembly membership to join the BJP, which renominated them in the bypoll from their respective seats.
Chief Minister Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh took a lead of 636 votes in the fifth round of counting after having trailed in the first four. She was locked in a battle of prestige, the result likely to be seen as a referendum on the performance of her husband’s 18-month-old Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu-led Congress government. She trailed by 261 votes after the first round, 360 votes after the second, 557 after the third and 37 votes in the fourth round. She belongs to Dehra constituency in Kangra district and is married in neighbouring Nadaun, the seat represented in the Assembly by the first-term Chief Minister Sukhu. All eyes, thus, were on the crucial Assembly bypoll in Dehra where the bypolls were conducted on July 1 (2024).
