The ruling BJP’s Kamlesh Shah came from behind and finally turned the tables on Congress candidate Dheeran Shah Invati in the last three rounds of counting, and the BJP wrested the Amarwara State Assembly seat from the Congress in the Madhya Pradesh by-poll by just over 3,000 votes on Wednesday.
Shah defeated Invati by 3,027 votes after the final 21st round of counting. Shah received 83,105 votes, while Invati secured 80,078 votes.
According to officials, the counting had to be stretched to an additional round after an EVM of a booth malfunctioned. The 478 votes in that EVM were counted with the help of Voter Verification Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) in the 21st round.
Originally, there were supposed to be 20 rounds of vote counting.
Devraman Bhalavi of the Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP) polled 28,723 ballots and came in the third position.
Congress candidate Dheeran Shah Invati was leading by over 5,500 votes after the 10th round of counting and by about 2,600 votes after the 16th round.
Nonetheless, Shah came back into the contest and gained a lead of 700 votes over Invati after 18 rounds of counting.
Shah continued to gain ground and eventually led by 3,252 votes after 20 rounds of vote counting.
The Congress alleged fudging in the last two rounds and demanded a recounting of votes. However, Chhindwara Collector and Returning Officer Sheelendra Singh rejected the Congress demand.
With this victory, the BJP has now won this seat four times — 1972, 1990, 2008 and 2024 — while the Congress has won it nine times. In 2003, the GGP won this seat.
BJP candidate Kamlesh Shah had won at Amarwara on a Congress ticket in the State Assembly elections of 2023. He had defeated the BJP’s Monika Manmohan Shah Batti by a margin of 25,086 votes.
However, Shah, a three-time Congress MLA and close confidant of former Congress CM Kamal Nath, quit the grand old party on 29 March and joined the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
Shah also resigned from his MLA membership in the State Assembly, necessitating the by-poll held on 10 July.
The by-election to this Scheduled Tribes-reserved seat in Chhindwara district was prestigious for both the ruling BJP and opposition Congress as Chhindwara was considered a stronghold of senior Congress leader Kamal Nath until recently.
The Congress, and Kamal Nath in particular, had already suffered a major jolt in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, as the BJP’s Vivek Bunty Sahu won the Chhindwara Lok Sabha seat by defeating Kamal Nath’s son and then Lok Sabha member of Congress Nakul Nath.