The bypoll result for the lone Assembly seat — Rupauli — in Bihar threw up a surprise on Saturday as muscleman Shankar Singh clinched it as an Independent candidate by defeating the ruling NDA and Opposition Mahagathbandhan candidates.

The seat had fallen vacant because of the resignation of Bima Bharti, who had switched from the JDU to the RJD and contested the Lok Sabha election from Purnia.

Shankar got 67,782 votes, 8,204 more than his nearest rival Kaladhar Mandal of the JDU in the constituency located in the Purnia district. Bima slipped to the third position with just 30,114 votes.

The results show a change in voters’ preference as they chose Shankar over the NDA and Mahagathbandhan candidates, despite high-voltage rallies by chief minister Nitish Kumar and RJD leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav.

Independent MP from Purnia, Rajesh Ranjan aka Pappu Yadav, had thrown his weight behind Bima, but it did not cut ice with the voters.

Shankar had last won the seat in 2005 as a candidate of the then Lok Janshakti Party under former Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan. After that, he lost the Assembly polls in 2010, 2015 and 2020 to Bima.

When Ram Vilas’s son Chirag Paswan refused Shankar the ticket this time on the grounds that his party LJP(R) was a part of the NDA and the seat belonged to the JDU, Shankar rebelled and contested as an Independent.

“I have served the people of Rupauli and Purnia continuously irrespective of winning or losing in the elections. I will continue doing so with more enthusiasm because the voters have imposed faith in me this time,” Shankar said.

BJP leader and deputy chief minister Vijay Kumar Sinha expressed satisfaction on the defeat of the RJD in the bypoll and said that Shankar was “connected to the NDA”.

On Shankar’s win, a senior JDU leader said: “It seems the public has done a balancing act by electing a strongman from the area so that he can stand against muscleman and Purnia MP Pappu Yadav if he runs amok.”