Agartala, May 4 (IANS) Tripura’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retained the Dharmanagar Assembly seat, where the by-election was held on April 9, and the results were declared on Monday.

According to the Election Commission, BJP candidate and the party’s North Tripura district Vice-President Jahar Chakraborti defeated opposition CPI-M nominee Amitabha Datta by a margin of 18,290 votes.

Chakraborti secured 24,291 votes, while Datta bagged 6,001 votes. Congress nominee Chayan Bhattacharya received 5,936 votes.

Chief Minister Manik Saha and state BJP President Rajib Bhattacharjee congratulated Chakraborti for his victory in the by-election.

Vote counting was held at the North Tripura district headquarters in Dharmanagar amid tight security arrangements.

The counting of votes began at 8 a.m. on Monday under tight security arrangements, officials said, and according to Election Commission data, since the onset, Chakraborti had established a significant lead over both Datta and Congress candidate Chayan Bhattacharya.

Election officials said that postal ballots were counted first, followed by votes cast in EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines), and after four rounds of counting in the North Tripura district headquarters at Dharmanagar, returning officer Debjani Choudhury declared the results.

Central observers appointed by the Election Commission monitored the counting process.

Over 80 per cent of the 46,142 voters, including 23,758 women, exercised their vote in the bypoll for the Dharmanagar Assembly constituency in North Tripura district on April 9. The bypoll was necessitated by the demise of sitting MLA and Assembly Speaker Biswa Bandhu Sen, who passed away on December 26 last year at a private hospital in Bengaluru after a prolonged illness at the age of 72.

Sen had been elected to the Tripura Assembly four times — twice as a Congress candidate in 2008 and 2013, and later in 2018 and 2023 as a BJP nominee from the same Assembly constituency. In the previous election, Sen had defeated then-Left-supported Congress leader Bhattacharjee by a margin of 956 votes.

The Dharmanagar Assembly constituency has remained a stronghold of either the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2008, with the CPI-M last winning the Assembly seat in 2003, with Datta its candidate.

A multi-cornered contest had made the electoral battle highly complex. The Left Front and the Congress, which had entered into a seat-sharing arrangement during the 2023 Tripura Assembly elections to jointly challenge the BJP, contested separately in this bypoll, adding another dimension to the contest.

–IANS

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