Congress defeats BJP in Madhya Pradesh by-poll

Dec 15, 2007, 14:10 GMT

Bhopal, Dec 15 (IANS) In a setback to Madhya Pradesh's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress Saturday won the by-elections for both the Khargone parliamentary and the Sanwer assembly seats.

While the BJP lost the Khargone seat by a record margin of over 118,000, it lost Sanwer by over 9,000 votes.

Of the total 768,668 valid votes polled in Khargone, Arun Yadav of the Congress got 392,092 votes while Krishna Murari Moghe of the BJP polled 273,454 votes.

In Sanwer, Congress candidate Tulsiram Silavat bagged 55,179 votes against 45,887 votes for the BJP nominee Santosh Malviya.

Buoyed by the result of the Dec 12 polls, the Congress has demanded the resignation of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, saying that the election outcome showed that the people had lost confidence in the BJP government.

'The results have proved that the public is fed up with corruption in the BJP government and has expressed confidence in the Congress instead,' said Congress general secretary and former chief minister Digvijay Singh.

Leader of Opposition Jamuna Devi said the results had proved the public was disillusioned by the BJP.

The BJP said it accepted the people's verdict and would look 'where it went wrong'.

'The party would review the cause of the defeat,' said state BJP spokesperson Umashankar Gupta.

'Definitely, there would have been some shortcomings that led to our defeat and we would look into the reasons behind our defeat'', BJP state president Narendra Singh Tomar said.

© 2007 Indo-Asian News Service