TRIPURA Chief Minister Manik Saha was among the victorious BJP candidates in the by-poll results announced on Sunday as the party bagged three out of four Assembly seats in the Eastern State and wrested the Samajwadi Party strongholds of Rampur and Azamgarh Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, while the AAP lost Punjab’s Sangrur parliamentary constituency.

However, there was some cheer for Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party as it retained Rajinder Nagar Assembly seat in the national capital.

The Congress won a seat each in Tripura, where it opened its account after drawing nil in the last Assembly polls, and Jharkhand, while the ruling YSR Congress emerged victorious in Atmakuru Assembly seat in Andhra Pradesh. Counting of votes was held on Sunday for the June 23 by-election to three Lok Sabha and seven assembly seats spread across five States and Delhi. In Uttar Pradesh, ruling BJP candidate Ghanshyam Lodhi won the Rampur parliamentary seat by a margin of over 42,000 votes. Lodhi defeated SP’s Mohd Asim Raja, considered close to senior SP leader Mohd Azam Khan who won the seat in 2019 but vacated it after being elected to the Assembly.

In Azamgarh, also a pocket borough of the SP and vacated by party chief Akhilesh Yadav after his election to the state Assembly, BJP candidate Dinesh Lal Yadav ‘Nirahua’ defeated Dharmendra Yadav of SP by a margin of 8,679 votes.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath attributed the victory to the work done by the ‘‘double-engine” Government of the BJP. In Delhi’s Rajinder Nagar, AAP’s Durgesh Pathak defeated BJP candidate Rajesh Bhatia by a margin of over 11,000 votes, officials said. The party, however, suffered a jolt in Punjab as SAD (Amritsar) leader Simranjit Singh Mann won the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat defeating AAP’s Gurmail Singh by a margin of 5,822 votes.