Byelections to 56 Assembly seats in several states and one parliamentary constituency in Bihar will be held along with the Bihar polls in November.

However, the Election Commission on Tuesday indefinitely deferred bypolls to seven Assembly constituencies in four states, including Bengal, which had cited difficulties in conducting the elections, especially due to rising Covid-19 cases.

Of the 56 Assembly seats going to the polls, 28 are in Madhya Pradesh, where several Congress MLAs defected to the BJP and resigned to bring down the earlier Kamal Nath-led government. The rest are eight in Gujarat, seven in Uttar Pradesh, two each in Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Nagaland and Odisha, and one each in Chhattisgarh, Haryana and Telangana. Manipur has 11 more vacant seats for which election petitions are pending in court.

In a statement, the commission said that it “has decided not to announce the conduct of elections at this stage” in two seats each in Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as well as Bengal’s Falakata Assembly seat. These states had given detailed requests that they are facing “difficulties in conduct of elections”. The term of the Assemblies of these states expire in May and June next year, and they are unlikely to have bypolls. A source said that rising coronavirus cases were one of the reasons cited by all these states.

Bihar’s Valmiki Nagar parliamentary seat, which fell vacant due to the death of Janata Dal United MP Baidyanath Mahato in February, will also go to the polls on November 7, along with its Assembly segments. Both Manipur seats will vote on the same day. The rest of the bypolls will take place on November 3. Polls to four Karnataka legislative council seats were also announced which will be held on October 28.