Shimla, Mar 16 (IANS): Voting for the four Lok Sabha seats in Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh will be held in a single phase on June 1, it was announced on Saturday.
All four seats - Kangra, Mandi, Hamirpur and Shimla (reserved) - are held by the BJP.
By-elections to six Assembly seats, all held by the Congress, will be held simultaneously.
The seats - Dharamsala, Lahaul-Spiti, Sujanpur, Barsar, Gagret and Kutlehar - fell vacant after the Congress disqualified its siting MLAs -- Rajinder Rana, Sudhir Sharma, Inder Dutt Lakhanpal, Devinder Kumar Bhutoo, Ravi Thakur, and Chetanya Sharma -- on the ground that they abstained from voting on the Budget, defying the party whip.
The counting of ballots of both the Parliamentary and the Assembly seats will take place on June 4.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the then state's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retained all four Lok Sabha seats as its candidates won by record margins.
Hamirpur's sitting MP Anurag Thakur, Kangra candidate Kishan Kapoor, Shimla candidate Suresh Kashyap and Mandi's sitting MP Ram Swaroop Sharma had won, defeating their Congress rivals.
This time again, the main contest is between the Congress and the BJP.
This time, the BJP fielded Union Minister Thakur again from Hamirpur and Kashyap from Shimla.
Anurag Thakur had won by over 3.81 lakh votes against Congress legislator Ram Lal Thakur. From Kangra, the largest Lok Sabha constituency in the state in terms of voters, the BJP had fielded then Cabinet minister Kapoor, after dropping veteran leader Shanta Kumar, against two-time Congress legislator Pawan Kajal, who is now a BJP legislator. Kapoor had defeated Kajal by a margin of more than 4.47 lakh votes.
In the Shimla seat, Colonel Dhani Ram Shandil (retired), the Congress candidate, had lost by over 3.23 lakh votes to BJP nominee and former Indian Air Force officer Kashyap.
Sitting BJP MP Ram Swaroop Sharma had won the seat for a second term from Mandi. Later, the seat fell vacant following his death and was won by Congress’ Pratibha Singh, wife of six-time Chief Minister, the late Virbhadra Singh.