Chandigarh: The Haryana Janhit Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party (HJC-BJP) combine and the ruling Congress on Sunday shared the honours in the results of the two Assembly seats where bypolls were held on November 30.
HJC-BJP candidate Renuka Bishnoi won the Adampur seat by a margin of 22,669 votes over her nearest rival, Kulvir Singh Beniwal of the Congress.
In the Ratia seat, the opposition Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) suffered a major setback as its candidate Sarfi Devi lost to Jarnail Singh of the Congress by a convincing margin of 12,703 votes.
Bishnoi, the wife of Hisar MP and HJC president Kuldeep Bishnoi and daughter-in-law of former chief minister Bhajan Lal, polled 50,276.
Her main rivals, Kulvir Beniwal of the Congress and Ram Singh Baswana of the INLD, polled 27,607 and 21,811 votes respectively. Bishnoi got more votes than the combined tally of both her nearest rivals.
The Congress win on the Ratia seat would give a major boost to the ruling party after it lost badly in the Hisar Lok Sabha seat by-election October this year.
Congress candidate Jarnail Singh polled 65,071 votes against the 52,368 votes polled by INLD's Sarfi Devi and 18,142 polled by the BJP's Mahavir Prasad.
The Congress, which had won this seat only once in 1982, that too by a margin of less than 200 votes when its candidate Neki Ram triumphed, got a convincing win Sunday by over 12,700 votes.
The INLD had won the last three Assembly elections in 2000, 2005 and 2009 on the Ratia seat. The seat fell vacant September after INLD legislator Gian Chand Odh passed away. Sarfi Devi is Odh's widow.
Counting on both seats started on Sunday morning and the eventual winners maintained their respective leads through all rounds of counting.
With the latest result, the Congress will now have a strength of 46 legislators in the 90-member Assembly. The main opposition INLD has been reduced to a tally of 30 legislators from the earlier 31.
Nearly 79 percent voter turnout was witnessed in the by-elections held on November 30.
While Adampur in Hisar district recorded nearly 76 percent polling, the voting percentage in Ratia in Fatehabad district was nearly 82 percent.
The Adampur seat in Hisar fell vacant in October following the election of HJC president Kuldeep Bishnoi to Parliament from the Hisar Parliamentary constituency.
IANS
First Published: Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:46