Himachal Pradesh by-poll result: Congress wins 2 seats, BJP bags 1

KULLU: Kamlesh Thakur, the wife of CM Sukhvinder Sukhu, secured her first victory from the Dehra constituency in Kangra district as Congress managed to win two out of the three assembly seats in the by-poll results declared on Saturday.
Hardeep Singh Bawa of Congress won from Nalagarh in Solan district, and BJP’s Ashish Sharma won from Hamirpur.
Kamlesh Thakur, who received 32,737 votes (57.94%), defeated BJP’s Hoshyar Singh, who garnered 23,338 votes (41.3%), by a margin of 9,399 votes.A total of 150 electors voted NOTA in Dehra.
After trailing by a narrow margin in the first four rounds, 53-year-old Thakur took the lead in the fifth round, eventually securing her first election victory by comfortably defeating Hoshyar Singh, who had previously won as an Independent candidate from Dehra twice — in 2017 and 2022.
Congress candidate Bawa also achieved a decisive victory from the Nalagarh seat by defeating BJP's K L Thakur with a margin of 8,990 votes. Bawa received 34,608 votes, while Thakur garnered 25,618 votes.
In the 2022 polls, Thakur had defeated Bawa by 13,264 votes.
BJP narrowly clinched the Hamirpur seat as its candidate Ashish Sharma defeated Congress' Pushpinder Verma by a margin of 1,571 votes. Sharma received 27,041 votes, while Verma secured 25,470 votes.
Sharma had previously defeated Verma by a margin of 12,899 votes in the 2022 elections.
A total of 13 candidates contested across these three assembly segments.
With these two victories, Congress has increased its tally from 38 to 40 seats in the 68-seat state Vidhan Sabha. BJP's total seats have also risen from 27 to 28.