The Congress won the Dehra Assembly seat for the first time on Saturday with its candidate Kamlesh Thakur, the wife of Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, defeating BJP candidate Hoshiyar Singh by a margin of 9,399 votes.

Thakur polled 32,737 votes in the bypoll against 23,338 votes polled by Singh. The three Independent candidates in this seat could not get even 200 votes each.

Of the 86,520 voters in this assembly segment, 65.42 per cent exercised their franchise on July 10.

Dehra Assembly constituency was carved out after a delimitation exercise in 2012. Senior BJP leader and former minister Ravi Inder Singh was elected from the seat in 2012. Hoshiyar Singh won the seat as an Independent in 2017 and 2022.

Hoshiyar Singh, as an Independent MLA, had voted in favour of the BJP's candidate in the Rajya Sabha elections held in February. He later resigned and joined the BJP. The party, in turn, made him a candidate for the Dehra bypoll.

During her election campaign, Kamlesh Thakur had said that she would not need to go to the secretariat to get the work of Dehra done. "I will get the work done from the chief minister at home itself," she had said.

Celebrations erupted at the official residence of the chief minister in Shimla, with supporters bursting crackers even before the final result was declared.

Bypolls to Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh were necessitated after the three Independents who had voted in favour of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha polls on February 27 resigned on March 22.

They joined the BJP the next day but their resignations were accepted by the Speaker on June 3. The BJP had fielded the Independents from their respective seats as party candidates.

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