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Video Editor: Vishal Kumar
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s track record in the Lok Sabha bypolls held since 2014 has been poor, and it has only gotten worse. Till now, out of the 27 Lok Sabha by-elections held since the Narendra Modi-led BJP came to power, it has managed to win only five of them.
Apart from the victory in Maharashtra’s Palghar on Thursday, 31 March, the four other seats that the BJP has won are Maharashtra’s Beed, Gujarat’s Vadodara, Assam’s Lakhimpur and Madhya Pradesh’s Shahdol.
The BJP lost Uttar Pradesh’s Kairana to RLD and Maharashtra’s Bhandara-Gondia to the NCP, while the NDPP won in Nagaland.
The saffron party, however, has claimed that it is only preparing to take a giant leap forward.
Like in the Lok Sabha seats, the by-poll results in the 10 Assembly seats have also been disappointing for the BJP, which has managed to retain only one seat.
The Congress termed Thursday’s outcome as the people's mandate against the four years of the Narendra Modi rule and the beginning of the end of BJP's empire.
Terming the outcome of the bypolls in Kairana and Noorpur in Uttar Pradesh as a defeat of divisive politics, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said the voters had delivered a befitting response to the BJP.
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