Manjalpur bypoll math: How BJP won but lost votes, Congress lost but gained vote share

Published 5 August 2026 · politics

The by-election result for Gujarat’s Manjalpur assembly constituency in Vadodara city didn’t throw up any apparent surprises, except in the fine-print. The BJP’s Satendra Patel

The by-election result for Gujarat’s Manjalpur assembly constituency in Vadodara city didn’t throw up any apparent surprises, except in the fine-print. The BJP’s Satendra Patel retained the seat for his party with a comfortable margin of 30,630 votes over Bhikhabhai Rabari of the Congress. The voter turnout was 37.5 per cent as against 60.15 per cent in the state polls of 2022. Of the 82,579 votes cast, Patel got 55,481, or 67.19 per cent. Rabari took 24,851 votes, or 30.09 per cent. Read Full Story In 2022, the BJP had bagged 75.77 per cent of the votes and the Congress 12.2 per cent. The bypoll was a straight fight between the BJP and Congress, with no challenge from a third entity. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which had contested Manjalpur in 2022 and received 9.97 per cent of the votes, sat out as did every independent candidate, giving observers a real sense of the electoral mood.

In 2022, Manjalpur had polled 158,548 votes. The BJP’s late MLA Yogesh Patel took 120,133 votes to beat Tashveen Singh of the Congress, who managed 19,379 votes (12.22 per cent). Most of the roughly 19,000 votes remaining votes went to AAP’s Vinay Chavan. What happened statewide in 2022 is the same story at scale. AAP contested 181 seats, polled 12.92 per cent of the votes and won in five constituencies. The BJP’s vote share rose from 49.05 per cent in 2017 to 52.5 per cent, a gain of 3.45 percentage points; its seat count shot up from 99 to 156. The Congress vote share fell from 41.44 per cent to 27.28 per cent, and its seats tally from 77 to 17. What was read as an overwhelming saffron wave in 2022 can now be seen in the context of the number of contestants at the ballot.

Manjalpur’s own record is telling in miniature. As a share of valid votes, the BJP took 67.4 per cent here in 2012; 66.4 per cent in 2017; 75.7 per cent in 2022 and 69.1 per cent in the 2026 bypoll. The Congress took about 29.7 per cent of the votes in 2012; 30.8 in 2017; 12.5 per cent in 2022 and 30.9 per cent this time. The odd year out is 2022, the only one in which AAP was in the contest. The seat fell vacant as Yogesh Patel died on June 2 after prolonged illness. He had won Manjalpur three times since 2012, represented Raopura before that, and was pro-tem speaker of the 15th legislative assembly (2022). The victorious Satendra Patel, a former Vadodara Municipal Corporation councillor and city-level party functionary, inherits a robust urban constituency whose loyalties towards the ruling BJP have not shifted in the past two decades.