Bhubaneswar: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clinched the bye-elections for Dhamnagar assembly constituency as its candidate Suryavanshi Suraj won from rival BJD by a margin of 9,881 votes.
Suraj was leading from the first and consistently maintained the trend till the end of counting for 18 rounds, on Sunday. While Suraj bagged 80,351 votes, his contender, Abanti Das polled 70,470 votes.
BJD rebel Rajendra Das got 8,153 votes while Congress candidate Baba Harekrushna Sethi polled 3,561 votes.
Suraj is the son of former Dhamnagar MLA Bishnu Sethi whose death necessitated the bypoll. He credited the people of Dhamnagar wholly, for the victory.
The second independent candidate Pabitra Mohan Das polled 497 votes, while 650 persons voted for NOTA. All total, 1,63,682 votes were cast in this bye-election, the Election Commission of India figures stated.
As per the ECI, Suraj got 49.09% votes followed by Das who bagged 43.05% votes. Das got around 5% votes and the Congress candidate Sethi received 2.18% votes.
