Jharkhand: Congress debutant trounces BJP veteran in Mandar by 24 thousand votes

RANCHI: Ruling Congress’s Shilpi Neha Tirkey trounced BJP’s Gangotri Kujur in the Mandar bypoll by a huge margin of 23,690 votes, the result of which was announced on Sunday.
With Shilpi’s win, Congress retained the seat that her father Bandhu Tirkey won in the 2019 assembly election on a JVM-P (now defunct) ticket and later joined the grand old party.Bandhu was disqualified earlier this year after he was convicted in a disproportionate assets case, thereby necessitating a bypoll.
For Congress, the Mandar bypoll victory is significant as it is for the first time that the party has officially won the seat since the creation of Jharkhand in 2000.
Shilpi, who will be 30 this August, is a debutant in the political arena and she won by a greater margin than her father did last time. By the end of 21 rounds of counting, Shilpi bagged a total of 95,486 votes against Gangotri’s 71,796. In 2019, Bandhu defeated BJP’s Deo Kumar Dhan by a margin of 23,127. In the bypoll, Dhan turned into a rebel and contested as an independent. He was later backed by AIMIM and finished a distant third with 22,395 votes.
Talking to TOI, Shilpi, who is now the 11th female legislator to enter the current assembly, said, “This is the victory of the Mandar electorates who reposed their faith in baba (father) by making me win. The people of Mandar know that baba was framed in false cases by BJP, leading to his disqualification. Now, I am here to fight for our people and to continue the unfinished work of my father.”
She added, “In this election, two MLAs have won — one is my father who will fight for the people’s cause outside the assembly and the other is me who will take up the issues inside the assembly.”