EC ANNOUNCES BYPOLLS TO 64 ASSEMBLY SEATS
NEWDELHI: Bypolls to 64 assembly seats and one Lok Sabha constituency spread across 18 states will be held on October 21 and the counting of votes will be on October 24, the Election Commission announced on Saturday.
While assembly by-elections will be held on 64 assembly seats, the Samastipur Lok Sabha constituency in Bihar will also have a bypoll.
These assembly seats include 15 in Karnataka and 11 in Uttar Pradesh.
Chief election commissioner Sunil Arora said the bypolls in Karnataka will be held on seats, including where sitting MLAS were disqualified recently.
The 11 UP assembly seats mostly belong to MLAS who had won the Lok Sabha elections and had resigned as members of the state assembly. The Samastipur (Bihar) Lok Sabha by-election was necessitated following the death of sitting MP Ram Chandra Paswan. Hundreds of members of the Bharatiya Kisan Sangathan marched on Saturday from Noida to Delhi’s Kisan Ghat, demanding loan waivers, higher prices for sugarcane crops and cheaper electricity in Uttar Pradesh. The march began on September 11. The agitating farmers were being stopped at various entry points of Delhi at its borders with UP, throwing the traffic on eastern borders of the national capital out of gear. Around 300 farmers had also stationed themselves in Delhi after talks with the government failed. Congress’s Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday questioned why BJP was preventing the farmers from coming to Delhi to raising their demands. The BSP also said the government must fulfil their demands even as protesters called off the march later.