Campaigning ends for bypolls on Ramgarh seat, voting on March 2

Ramgarh: Campaigning on Saturday came to an end for the by-polls on the Ramgarh Seat of Jharkhand Assembly voting which will be held on February 27 while counting of the votes will be undertaken on March 2. The main battle in the elections is between Bajrang Mahto of the Congress and Sunita Chowdhary of the AJSU party.

While Congress is part of the Mahagathbandhan government of Jharkhand led by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, AJSU is in the NDA folder led by the BJP. A total of 18 candidates are in the fray for the seat but the main battle is between the AJSU and the Congress.

The by-polls were necessitated on the seat after Congress MLA Mamta Devi lost the membership of the house after she was awarded five years of imprisonment by a Hazaribagh MP-MLA court on December 13, 2022 in connection with the Gola Firing Incident case.

The by-poll is the fifth in the present tenure of the Mahagathbandhan government of Jharkhand being led by JMM’s Hemant Soren as after coming to power in December 2019 it had to face by-polls in Dumka Bermo Madhupur and Mandar in which all the seats were saved by the parties in power.

As a UPA candidate of the Congress party Mamta Devi had managed to win the Ramgarh seat and had gone on to become a first-time MLA. She had got a total of 99,944 votes while Sunita Chowdhary wife of Giridih MP Chandraprakash Chowdhary had secured 71,226 votes to come at the second position while Rananjay Kumar alias Kantu Babu of BJP had finished third having got 31,874 votes.

In the Assembly elections of 2019, the BJP and AJSU had parted their ways and had contested separately but since then a lot of political changes have taken place in the state and this time Ramgarh is seeing a bipolar contest. Chief Minister Hemant Soren himself led the campaigning for the Congress candidate having addressed five public meetings and even held out a road show in the constituency.

Top leadership of the state Congress including in-charge for party affairs in Jharkhand Avinash Pandey, JPCC president Rajesh Thakur, CLP Leader Aalamgir Aalam along with other cabinet ministers in the Soren government of the state along with many MLAs of the Congress and the JMM also campaigned for the polls.

On the other hand, while AJSU supremo Sudesh Mahto and Giridih MP Chandraprakash Chowdhary led extensive campaigning for the party candidate the BJP also pulled all its might behind its all as Union Minister for Tribal Affairs Arjun Munda, Leader of legislature wing of BJP Babulal Marandi, State unit chief and RS MP Deepak Prakash, former Chief Minister Raghubar Das along with Hazaribagh MP Jayant Sinha and all the other MLAs of the BJP also campaigned in favour of the AJSU candidate.