However, Haryana has suffered the most. The Congress could win only 40 seats in the preponed Assembly elections held last month against 67 it had won in 2005. Even the party bigwigs including Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and state Congress President Phool Chand Mullana, who also lost from his home constituency, admitted that infighting was the main reason for the party's failure to get an absolute majority on its own. It had to lure seven Independents with ministerial berths to get support and form the government. It has also engineered defections of five of the six MLAs of Bhajan Lal's Haryana Janhit Congress who have since joined the Congress to raise the party's strength to 45 in an effective house of 89 seats which has one vacant seat.

Although both the ruling and rival camps have been blaming each other for sabotaging their respective supporters prospects, the ruling camp has held the former Hooda ministry's Forest Minister Kiran Choudhary for the defeat of at least three candidates from Bhiwani, her daughter Shruti Choudhary's Parliamentary constituency. In Punjab, the Congress lost all the four Assembly by-elections held since the last Lok Sabha elections mainly because of the infighting between former Chief Minister Capt. Amarinder Singh and CLP leader Rajinder Kaur Bhattal groups. Amarinder avoided participating in the campaign. Of the four three were already Akali Dal seats which it wrested Kahnuwan from the Congress.

In Himachal Pradesh, the Congress lost to the BJP its Rohru bastion which Union Steel Minister Virbhadra Singh had never lost except during the 1977 Janata wave. The party, however, wrested Jawali, the BJP's stronghold in the state's politically most important district of Kangra which has 15 seats, the largest in a district in the 68-member Assembly. The two seats had fallen vacant following the election of Virbhadra and BJP's Rajan Sushant to the Lok Sabha. What made the Congress lose the Raja's (Virbhadra) stronghold of Rohru was the success of his rivals to thwart his efforts to get the ticket for his former MP wife Pratibha Singh. There was virtual revolt in the Rohru Congress against the denial of ticket to Pratibha Singh. Initially, Virbhadra first avoided visiting Rohru but later his campaign in the constituency failed to muster support for his party's candidate.

In Jawali, the refusal of ticket to BJP MP Rajan Sushant's close relation who contested as an Independent also caused a revolt in the party. During the campaign Sushant had gone overboard in his comments against the BJP and the functioning of the Prem Kumar Dhumal-led state government.

The political significance of the two by-elections is that the Congress's defeat in Rohru further indicates that the party is losing support in the upper region of the hill state which was its stronghold. The party had earlier conceded substantial base in the tribal belt to the BJP. The BJP's loss of Jawali is a big setback for the party as it has been drawing its main support from the lower region of the state of which Kangra is a major component. (IPA)