The Adampur seat has been held by the Bhajan Lal family since 1968.

New Delhi:

After the third round of counting in Haryana’s Adampur bypoll, BJP’s Bhavya Bishnoi is leading with a margin of over 6,000 votes. There’s a close contest between the BJP and Congress candidates.

BJP’s Bhavya Bishnoi, with 17,633 votes, is leading. Jai Prakash from Congress, the closest rival, is trailing at 11,398, and Aam Aadmi Party’s Satender Singh has fewer than 2,000 votes so far.

The Adampur assembly bypoll will decide if the Bhajan Lal family holds on to its bastion of five decades.

Twenty-two candidates, all men, had contested from the seat.

Former Chief Minister Bhajan Lal’s younger son Kuldeep Bishnoi, whose son Bhavya Bishnoi is the BJP candidate, has maintained that Adampur has been his family’s citadel, and that people have showered their love and blessings on it for decades and would do so once again. 

The Adampur seat has been held by the Bhajan Lal family since 1968, with the late ex-Chief Minister representing it on nine occasions, his wife Jasma Devi once, and Kuldeep Bishnoi on four occasions.

Congress leader and former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, however, has termed Adampur a stronghold of his party. Late Bhajan Lal was a Chief Minister from the Congress, he has underlined.

The bypoll was necessitated after Kuldeep Bishnoi resigned as MLA from the seat and switched sides from the Congress to the BJP in August.

Bhavya Bishnoi (29) had lost 2019 Lok Sabha polls on the Congress ticket from Hisar to BJP’s bureaucrat-turned-politician Brijendra Singh.

The Congress has fielded former Union minister Jai Prakash, a three-time MP from Hisar and two-time MLA as well.