A BELLWETHER BYPOLL

If there is one key takeaway from the recent assembly bypolls across six states, it is the continuing decline of the Congress as the fulcrum of the opposition in national poli­ tics.

- Amarnath K. Menon

While five seats saw status quo, including three retained by the BJP (Gopalganj in Bihar, Dhamnagar in Odisha, Gola Gokarnnath in UP), both the upsets were at the cost of the grand old party, which lost the Adampur seat in Haryana to the saffron party and the Munugode seat in Telangana to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS).

The Munugode seat had fallen vac­ ant since K. Rajagopal Reddy, who had bagged it in 2018 on a Congress ticket by defeating the TRS’s K. Prabhakar Reddy, crossed over to the BJP in August. This time, Prabhakar beat Rajagopal by a margin of 10,309 votes. Congress candidate Palvai Sravanthi lost her deposit, just like the BJP can­didate had in 2018—a clear pointer to the state’s increasingly bipolar electoral landscape that is now dominated by the TRS and the saffron party, with the grand old party pushed to the margins. Analysts point out that the backing of the CPI and the CPI(M), which are said to have the support of 20,000 voters in Munugode, played a decisive role in ensuring the TRS victory.