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Three newly elected members of the Himachal Pradesh legislative assembly took their oaths as legislators on Monday after winning the recently concluded by-elections.
Congress candidates Kamlesh Thakur, Hardeep Baba Bawa and BJP candidate Ashish Sharma took the oath after winning the seats in Dehra, Nalagarh and Hamirpur, respectively. Congress candidate and Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu's wife, Kamlesh Thakur, won the assembly by-election from the Dehra constituency by defeating Hoshyar Singh of the BJP. Congress candidate Hardeep Singh Bawa won the Nalagarh assembly constituency seat by defecating the BJP's KL Thakur. The only silver lining for the BJP in the assembly by-elections is in Hamirpur, where its candidate Ashish Sharma won by a slender lead. The seats fell vacant after the three independent legislators, Hoshiyar Singh from Dehra, Ashish Sharma from Hamirpur and K L Thakur from Nalagarh, who had voted in favour of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha polls held on February 27, resigned from the state assembly on March 22 and joined the party the next day. Expressing satisfaction over the bypoll results, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu said, "This is the victory of people over money power. The voters have delivered a strong rebuke to the politics of horse trading and have voted to maintain political integrity in the state. It had been 25 years since a Congress candidate won in Dehra. In Nalagarh, too, the candidate secured a significant victory. The election outcome has sent a clear message to the entire country and in the future, no candidate of any party in Himachal Pradesh will dare engage him or her in horse-trading for the next 50 years." The results of the assembly by-polls came as a setback for the BJP, where the party won only two of the 13 seats, with the INDIA bloc winning 10 seats and an independent candidate winning one seat across seven states across the country. (ANI)
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