Haryana's assembly by-election results are a story of extremes - the three Congress candidates won by margins of over 100,000 and all their rivals lost their security deposits.

Riding on popularity and a sympathy wave, the three Congress leaders who decimated their opposition were Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Kiran Chaudhary and Savitri Jindal from Kiloi, Tosham and Hisar respectively.

Chaudhary and Jindal were contesting seats left vacant by the deaths of their husbands, ministers Surender Singh and O.P. Jindal, in a helicopter crash on March 31.

The main opposition Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had withdrawn from the process in Tosham and Hisar citing their respect for the late Congress ministers.
 
In Kiloi, the BJP did field a candidate against Hooda. However, he unilaterally withdrew his name greatly embarrassing the party. And the INLD candidate got a mere 3,063 votes.

Interestingly, Hooda did not visit Kiloi even once during the entire campaign.

Kiran Chaudhary, fighting for her husband's seat, won with a margin of over 125,500 votes from Tosham - a clear 99.37 percent of the total votes polled.

In the process, she beat the 19-year record of her father-in-law and former Haryana chief minister Bansi Lal who had bagged over 98 percent votes from the same seat in 1986.

No candidate in Haryana's electoral history had ever broken the 100,000-vote margin barrier.

The early record was over 86,000 votes by former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala's son, Abhay Chautala, in the 2000 assembly by-election in Rori.

In the February 2 assembly polls, when the Congress swept to power after nine years, the highest margin recorded was of 71,000 votes by former chief minister Bhajan Lal from his traditional Adampur assembly seat.

The election of Chaudhary and Jindal has established another record with 13 woman legislators in the assembly. Eleven of these are from the ruling Congress, which has a strength of 67 in the 90-member house.