A new political development has been observed: the Indian opposition alliance seems to have come out on top in the recently held assembly by-elections across seven states, shocking the BJP ruling party.
All the major pre-poll alliances of India, namely the INDIA bloc, including Congress, Trinamool Congress (TMC), Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), delivered stupendous performances. They won 10 out of the 13 contested assembly seats. On the other hand, the BJP could capture merely two and a vastly different outcome from the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The by-polls held on Wednesday were the first major electoral contests after the 2024 general elections, in which the BJP got 240 seats to form a government, albeit failing to achieve the majority. However, the NDA alliance, which the BJP is a member of, scored a total of 293 votes, which is greater than half of the seats in the house.
In Punjab, AAP candidate Mohinder Bhagat came out victorious in the Jalandhar West Assembly constituency with an over 23,000-vote margin. In the same way, West Bengal was again up to expectations for the Trinamool Congress, which captured all four seats where the poll took place.
In Himachal Pradesh, L. P. Chief, the Congress, on the other hand, improved its position considerably, and Kamlesh Thakur, the wife of its chief minister-designate, Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, won her first election at Dehra. The party also retained the Nalagarh seat for itself, but the BJP performed well and won the Hamirpur seat.
In April, Tamil Nadu went to the polls. DMK candidate Anniyur Siva scored a massive victory in the Vikravandi assembly constituency, with a lead of nearly 60000 votes.
These subsequent by-elections show that the INDIA alliance has gained appreciable political ground, and the voters are not very happy with the BJP’s performance. With the state election upcoming soon and the 2029 Lok Sabha polls, this has severe ramifications for the political complexion of the nation.
