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Assembly bypolls: BJP wins Gujarat, Congress bags Kerala, AAP takes Punjab
Counting is underway for the by-elections held on June 19 across five Assembly constituencies in Gujarat, Kerala, Punjab, and West Bengal. The seats contested include Kadi and Visavadar in Gujarat, Nilambur in Kerala, Ludhiana West in Punjab, and Kaliganj in West Bengal.
BJP and AAP split wins in Gujarat
In Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) split the two contested seats.
In Kadi (SC), BJP's Rajendrakumar Daneshwar Chavda won by a commanding margin of 39,452 votes, securing 99,742 votes against Congress candidate Rameshbhai Chavda's 60,290. The seat fell vacant after the death of BJP MLA Karsan Solanki in February.
Visavadar saw a win for AAP's Italia Gopal, who defeated BJP's Kirit Patel by 17,554 votes. Gopal received 75,942 votes while Patel garnered 58,388. The seat became vacant after former AAP MLA Bhupendra Bhayani resigned and joined the BJP.
Congress retains Kerala's Nilambur
In Kerala, Congress' Aryadan Shoukath secured a win in Nilambur, defeating CPI(M)'s M Swaraj by a margin of 11,077 votes. Shoukath garnered 77,737 votes while Swaraj received 66,660.
The bypoll was necessitated by the resignation of PV Anvar, a Left-backed independent MLA who later joined the Trinamool Congress. Anvar had previously won the seat in 2021 by a narrow margin of 2,700 votes.
AAP clinches Ludhiana West in Punjab
In Punjab, AAP's Sanjeev Arora won the Ludhiana West bypoll, defeating Congress' Bharat Bhushan Ashu by 10,637 votes. Arora received 35,179 votes to Ashu's 24,542.
The seat was vacated following the death of sitting AAP MLA Gurpreet Bassi Gogi earlier this year. BJP's Jiwan Gupta secured third place with 20,323 votes, while Shiromani Akali Dal's Parupkar Singh Ghuman managed 8,203.
Since its formation in 1977, Congress has won Ludhiana West six times, while the BJP has never claimed the seat.
TMC ahead in Bengal's Kaliganj
In West Bengal's Kaliganj, Alifa Ahmed of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) leads by a margin of 51,334 votes after 19 of 23 rounds of counting. She has secured 91,480 votes so far, ahead of BJP's Ashish Ghosh with 40,146 votes and Congress' Kabil Uddin Shaikh with 26,220.
The bypoll was called following the death of TMC MLA Nasiruddin Ahmed, Alifa Ahmed's father. With a Muslim electorate comprising around 54 per cent, Kaliganj is considered politically significant ahead of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly polls.
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Hindustan Times
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The Emergency and politics of the body
For the average Indian, it was through the tyranny of the dreaded nasbandi (sterilisation) camps that the worst consequences of the suspension of civil and political rights under the Emergency manifested itself in their everyday lives. In September 1976, India recorded over 1.7 million sterilisations, a figure that equalled the annual average for the 10 preceding years. By 1977, Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and his bulldozer gang had overseen the conduct of more than 8 million sterilizations. The predominance accorded to forced sterilisation was intertwined with Sanjay Gandhi's growing influence. He needed to consolidate his hold on power within the Congress, family planning (and his other obsession, urban gentrification) became his preferred tools. In the process, he unleashed the worst form of State violence, stripping ordinary citizens of agency over their bodies. The political and administrative zeal to comply with Sanjay Gandhi and his bulldozer gang was shaped by the nature of power he wielded over regional leaders. (HT Photo) Much has changed in India's approach to family planning since those dark Emergency years. However, 50 years on, Sanjay Gandhi's weaponisation of family planning and exertion of power over individual bodily rights afford important lessons for how we respond to demographic challenges in the contemporary moment. Above all, it serves as a critical reminder to be patient with democracy, for it is the only pathway for sustainable, socially just economic growth and development. On the surface, Sanjay Gandhi's approach to family planning was not new. Malthusian worries had shadowed India's demographic debates long before independence and India became the first country in the world to launch a national family planning programme in 1952. And as Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil argue in India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77, elements of eugenics, visible in the Emergency, undergirded these debates. 'Undesirable others' – minorities and lower castes – were the targets. Coercive population control measures were introduced as necessary tools for 'modernisation' and 'development'. But it was only in the late 1960s that sterilisation acquired wide policy acceptance. On paper, India took a 'cafeteria approach' with sterilisation offered as one of many forms of family planning. In practice, however, sterilisation was prioritised. Targets were introduced and vasectomy camps, cash incentives, citizen motivators, and active coercion became acceptable methods to control India's 'population bomb'. But like most policies, implementation waxed and waned. India's sterilisation drive peaked in 1972-3 with 3.1 million sterilisations, falling to just under a million the next year. What differentiated mass sterilisation during the Emergency from the past was the scale and aggressiveness with which it was pursued. International agencies from the World Bank to the United Nations played their part, financing what they called 'crash sterilisation'. Sanjay Gandhi effectively leveraged Emergency conditions to direct political and administrative functionaries to use force and coercion with a vengeance. He bypassed the health ministry to directly hand out targets to states and used his powers to harass and intimidate regional leaders, bureaucrats and district administrators to comply. Over time, his tactics became almost necessary to feed the Emergency myth: That suspension of democracy and centralisation of power was necessary to ensure the 'trains run on time'. Eugenics, Jaffrelot and Anil, note were implicit in this framing in the targeting of Muslims and the poor. The horror that unfolded has been widely chronicled. 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Those who sought to protect their dignity and individual agency by escaping the sterilisation net, lived in terror. As ethnographer Emma Tarlo notes in her account of the nasbandi tyranny in Delhi, for anyone who escaped, public spaces and civic institutions like hospitals, schools and government offices, were places to avoid. Unsurprisingly, in many parts of the country, fear led to violence. Nasbandi was widely attributed to have contributed to Indira Gandhi's resounding electoral defeat. In a direct and tactile way, the ordinary Indian experienced the terror of the powers of the State over their bodies and they used democracy to reclaim control. Since that dark period, India's family planning policy, in tune with global trends, has evolved adopting a much more central focus on reproductive rights. 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