Congress manages to do well in Chhattisgarh civic body polls; BJP loses seats

After suffering crushing defeats in Assembly and parliamentary polls in the past year, Congress put up a good show in the Chhattisgarh civic body elections and won four out of ten municipal seats, while the ruling BJP was reduced to from six to four. The remaining two seats were won by independent candidates, including a eunuch.

"Congress won municipal corporation polls in Raipur, Ambikapur, Korba and Jagdalpur, while the BJP bagged Bilaspur, Rajnandagon, Durg and the newly-formed Dhamtari," an election official told PTI.

"Two other corporations, namely Chirmiri and Raigarh were won by independent candidates," the official said. In the previous civic body polls held in 2009, the BJP had won six seats, while the Congress won three.

The prominent Raipur municipal corporation was retained by Congress as its candidate Pramod Dubey defeated BJP's Schchidanand Upasane by a whopping margin of 16,338 votes.

Two-time corporator Dubey was chosen as the Congress candidate this time, denying ticket to incumbent Congress mayor Kiranmayee Nayak which proved fruitful for the party.

Jagdalpur's seat in the Maoist-heartland of Bastar region was won by the Congress's Jatin Jaiswal who defeated BJP's Yogendra Kaushik by 2,637 votes. BJP's incumbent mayor Kiran Dev was denied ticket from the seat this time.

However, the Congress failed to retain the Bilaspur municipal corporation despite raising the issue of botched sterilisation surgeries which occurred during November last year. Ramsharan Yadav, the new face of Congress suffered a loss at the hands of BJP's Kishore Rai by a huge margin of 35,117 votes for Bilaspur mayoral post.