The Election Commission of India on Monday declared bypolls to 13 vacant Assembly seats in seven states.

The vacancies include one each in Bihar, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, two in Uttarakhand, three in Himachal Pradesh and four in Bengal.

Nominations will be accepted from June 14 to 21, polling will be held on July 10 and counting on July 13.

The Bengal seats include Raiganj, Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagda and Maniktala. The MLAs from the first three seats defected to the Trinamool Congress and unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha polls. Maniktala Trinamool MLA Sadhan Pandey passed away in 2022.

However, BJP’s Kalyan Chaubey, who lost the Assembly polls to Pandey in 2021,
had challenged the results in the Calcutta High Court. Chaubey withdrew his case last month, which paved the way for the polls.

Besides two deaths of MLAs in Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, the rest are MLAs who defected to the BJP.

The Rajya Sabha is also set to have several vacancies after its member ministers Piyush Goyal, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sarbananda Sonowal have been elected to the Lok Sabha.

The Trinamool wrote to the EC on Monday, saying: “There is absolutely no valid or rational reason for conducting staggered bypolls in the same state for different Assembly seats that are vacant and soon to be vacant. This only serves to affect governance and hinder smooth functioning of the administration by keeping the state in election mode constantly.”

Five of its MLAs and one BJP MLA have been elected to the Lok Sabha. However, their vacancies were yet to be published on the Bengal Assembly website till the filing of the report.