Patna, Feb. 16: The NDA today retained the Harlakhi Assembly seat and bettered its victory margin by six times over last November's result.

Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) candidate Sudhanshu Shekhar (28) won the seat by 18,650 votes over Grand Alliance rival and Congress candidate Mohammad Shabbir. Sudanshu's father Basant Kumar had won the seat by 3,910 votes over the same Congress candidate in November but died before taking oath, necessitating the bypoll. Sudhanshu is his youngest son.

"We were expecting to wrest this seat from the NDA. But Basant's death generated silent sympathy among voters," Congress Legislature party leader Sadanand Singh said.

Senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi interpreted it differently. "It was a referendum on the functioning of the Nitish Kumar government," Sushil said. "The results have proved the people are disenchanted with the government within its honeymoon period. The Grand Alliance had won the Assembly polls by misleading people on the job quota issue. Now, the backward and Scheduled Caste voters have returned to the NDA fold."

What might have demoralised Grand Alliance cadres - particularly in north Bihar's Mithila region, where Harlakhi falls, and the Grand Alliance had virtually swept last year's polls - is the sharp rise in NDA's vote-share against the Grand Alliance. Sudhanshu has notched up 46.31 per cent of votes against Shabbir's 32.31 per cent. Last November, the Grance Alliance had secured 41.9 per cent votes against the NDA's 34.1 per cent.

Political observers see the RLSP victory as a much-needed "breather" for the NDA before it enters the big battle in Assam and Bengal. It has also given Grand Alliance strategists a chance to ponder over why it faced such a massive defeat in a constituency with a sizeable Muslim-Yadav (M-Y) electorate, RJD chief Lalu Prasad's core voter base.

While the NDA campaign was low-key, Lalu had campaigned extensively with Congress general secretary Shakeel Ahmad and state Congress ministers. Nitish had avoided campaign despite the Congress's request. The Congress grapevine has it the chief minister "consciously" avoided campaigning in Harlakhi where Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP had fielded a candidate belonging to the Kushwaha caste.

"Upendra had formed the RLSP to bag Kushwaha votes. But many Kushwahas rejected Upendra and backed Nitish in the Assembly polls," said a senior Congress leader. "Nitish might have foreseen sympathy votes for Sudhanshu and skipped campaign this time."

The Left-backed CPI nominee Ramnaresh Pandey polled 19,835 votes.