The ruling BJP, which on Friday won both Dhanpur and Boxanagar Assembly constituencies thrashing its CPI (M) rivals with massive margins of votes, created history in Tripura as for the first time a minority Muslim candidate won as a saffron party nominee.
The BJP wrested the Boxanagar seat from the CPI-M and retained the Dhanpur seat even as the two assembly constituencies were once strongholds of the Left parties. Election officials said that BJP candidate Taffajal Hossain, with 34,146 votes, won in Boxanagar by a margin of 30,237 votes defeating his CPI (M) opponent Mizan Hossain, who bagged 3,909 votes only.
BJP Nominee Bindu Debnath (30,017 votes) won the Dhanpur constituency beating his CPI-M challenger Kaushik Chanda (11146 votes) by a margin of 18871 Votes. The 51-year-old Muslim leader Taffajal Hossain, the first Muslim nominee elected to the Tripura assembly as BJP nominee unsuccessfully contested the February 16 assembly polls from the same Muslim-dominated Boxanagar constituency.
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He lost to CPI-M’s Samsul Haque, who died on July 19 following a cardiac attack necessitating the by-polls, by a margin of 4631 votes. The by-election to the Dhanpur seat was necessitated after Union Minister Pratima Bhoumik resigned from the Assembly, days after she was elected from the seat as a BJP nominee in the February Assembly elections.
The by-polls were held on Tuesday, and the voter turnout stood at 86.56 percent, with 93,495 eligible voters casting their ballots. The Congress and the Tipra Motha Party (TMP), the other two main opposition parties in the state, had earlier announced not to field candidates in the two seats to prevent division of vote share.
The leaders of TMP headed by Pradyot Bikram Manikya Deb Barman, however, two days before the by-elections, had declared not to support the CPI-M or the BJP in the by-elections, leaving the choice to the voters and party workers.
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