A month after its resounding victory in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday swept the biennial polls to the state’s legislative council by winning 33 out of 36 constituencies. According to the results declared on Tuesday, the BJP won 24 of the 27 local authority seats for which polling was held last week. In addition, the BJP had won nine of the 36 seats unopposed. The results take the BJP past the halfway-mark in the 100-member House. Now, it will have 67 members in the upper house of the state legislature.
But it suffered a setback in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, where it stood a distant third. The Samajwadi Party, the main opposition in the state, drew a blank. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday described the BJP’s sweep of the Legislative Council polls as yet another expression of people’s trust in the BJP’s development model. In a tweet, he congratulated the winners and also greeted Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and BJP functionaries.
Two independents and a candidate from the Jansatta Dal-Loktantrik emerged victorious in the elections to the local authority constituencies. In Varanasi, BJP’s Sudama Patel stood third with just 170 votes as Independent candidate Annapurna Singh secured a resounding victory with 4,234 votes. Samajwadi Party’s Umesh Yadav got 345 votes, Varanasi District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma said. Before the polls, the BJP had 34 members in House. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath congratulated the winners and said the BJP’s resounding victory in the council polls has again established that people of the state have faith in the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The ruling BJP won in Moradabad-Bijnor, Rampur-Bareilly, Pilibhit-Shahjahanpur, Sitapur, Lucknow-Unnao, Rae Bareli, Sultanpur, Barabanki, Bahraich, Gonda, Faizabad, Basti-Siddarthanagar, Gorakhpur-Maharajganj, Deoria, Ballia, Jaunpur, Allahabad, Jhansi-Jalaun-Lalitpur, Etawah-Farrukhabad, Meerut-Ghaziabad, Agra-Firozabad and Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur. Akshay Pratap Singh of Jansatta Dal-Loktantrik defeated BJP’s Hari Pratap Singh in Pratapgarh by a margin of 1,107 votes.
The BJP lost Azamgarh-Mau seat to independent candidate Vikrant Singh “Rishu” by 2,813 votes.