Former IPS officer and JVM(P) candidate Ajay Kumar won in the Jamshedpur Lok Sabha bypoll by a record margin of over 1.55 lakh votes on Monday, delivering a rude shock to Jharkhand’s three ruling allies — BJP, JMM and AJSU — and JVM(P)’s ally Congress, who had all fielded candidates and campaigned hard.
By wresting the reins of the prestigious constituency from the hands of the BJP and the JMM, who had alternately won the seat for long, the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik), a regional party led by the state’s first chief minister Babulal Marandi, signalled its rising popularity in the state after the 2009 Assembly polls, when 11 of its 25 contesting candidates had won in the 81-member House.
For the main ruling party BJP, the defeat brought an agonising bitterness because the Jamshedpur seat was last won by the party’s most prominent state leader and current chief minister Arjun Munda in the 2009 general elections. Mr Munda’s elevation as the chief minister in September 2010 necessitated the bypoll. BJP candidate Dineshanand Goswami, also the party’s state unit president, stood second by securing only 1.17 lakh votes despite BJP national president Nitin Gadkari having campaigned for him.
Mr Kumar, who served as SP of Jamshedpur from 1994 to 1997 before leaving government service to work in the corporate sector, secured over 2.76 lakh votes in the keenly contested bypoll in which 20 candidates vied for the support of the constituency’s 13.97 lakh eligible voters. Candidates of the ruling allies JMM and AJSU — former deputy chief minister Sudhir Mahto and Astik Mahto — stood at third and fourth positions with 1.14 lakh and 98,472 votes respectively.
Congress candidate Banna Gupta was pushed to the fifth slot despite Union ministers Salman Khurshid and Subodh Kant Sahay having campaigned for him. Mr Gupta, a sitting MLA, secured only 48,956 votes. Despite the JVM(P)’s antagonistic stance towards its ally Congress and the acrimony over the bypoll, Jharkhand Congress spokesman Radhakrishna Kishore described the JVM(P)’s victory as “the UPA’s victory and the Munda government’s defeat”.