Polling opens in Nagaon and five assembly byelections, with counting on Friday

Polling opened at 7 a.m. on Tuesday for byelections to one Lok Sabha seat and five assembly seats, and it is due to close at 6 p.m., except in Nagaon where the scheduled close is 5 p.m. Counting is on Friday, 9 October. The seats are Nagaon in Assam, Nandigram and Rejinagar in West Bengal, Madurantakam and Dharapuram in Tamil Nadu, and Thattanchavady in Puducherry.

Nagaon is the parliamentary contest, and the one with a published voter roll large enough to describe. India Today NE reported 19,02,009 electors, 9,58,595 men and 9,43,364 women, across 13 assembly segments, eight in Nagaon district and five in Morigaon. The administration has set up 1,339 polling stations and deployed 11,535 officials. Of the stations, 968 are in Morigaon. Seven nominations were rejected at scrutiny. Three candidates withdrew. Fifteen remain, including nine independents.

The fight is three-cornered. The BJP candidate is Devashish Sharma. The AIUDF candidate is party chief Badruddin Ajmal. The Congress candidate is Sibamani Bora. Nagaon is a Muslim-majority constituency. The BJP is trying to expand in it. Congress is trying to hold a minority base. The AIUDF is trying to recover influence after the April assembly election cut it from 16 MLAs to two. A parliamentary byelection does not change the state government. It does test whether that assembly result still describes the district.

The assembly byelections were forced by vacancies after the 2026 assembly elections and later changes among sitting members. Nandigram, in West Bengal, is the seat with the longest recent memory in national coverage, because of the 2021 fight there. Tuesday's ballot is a byelection, not a repeat of that contest, and the candidate lists in the early wires are thinner than Nagaon's. Rejinagar is the other Bengal seat. Madurantakam and Dharapuram are the Tamil Nadu seats. Thattanchavady is the Puducherry seat. News18 listed all six as voting on Tuesday.

The stakes differ by house. Nagaon fills a Lok Sabha chair. The five assembly seats change, at the margin, the numbers in three legislatures and one assembly in a Union territory. None of the five is large enough, on the published arithmetic, to overturn a government by itself. They are large enough to embarrass a ruling party that loses a seat it held, or to give an opposition party a spokesperson with a fresh mandate.

Turnout is the number that will not exist until the evening. A 19-lakh roll in Nagaon, polled across 1,339 stations, is an administrative exercise as much as a political one. The split of stations toward Morigaon, 968 of 1,339, means the result will be sensitive to how that district votes, not only to the Nagaon town booths that usually lead the coverage. The 11,535 officials are the state's answer to that spread.

Friday's count will produce six results and one comparison. In Nagaon the comparison is between a BJP that wants a foothold, a Congress candidate trying to retain the seat, and an AIUDF chief running in person after his party's assembly collapse. In the five assembly seats the comparison is local. The polls opened at 7 a.m. The first verified fact of the day is that the booths are open, not who is winning them.