BJP rides Modi wave to win big in UP

The party was also poised to roar back to power in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand with thumping majority and locked in a close contest for power in two other states – Goa and Manipur.

The Election Commission says Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is leading in 293 out of 403 seats in the Uttar Pradesh state legislature.

A high adrenaline session this whole assembly election was, Manipur witnessed an assembly election like never before where the parties involved were as dynamic as the situation the State was going through. In a hurry to join hands with Congress, Akhilesh compromised too many winnable seats to Congress.

As per Chanakya’s figures, Congress and SP are far behind at 85, while the BSP has managed merely 27 seats.

Among other cabinet ministers who were defeated was tourism minister Dilip Parulekar who lost the Saligao seat to Jayesh Salgaonkar of Goa Forward by 2,137 votes. Even Arunachal Pradesh has a BJP government now.

However, the exit polls expected the SP to perform better. Although Akhilesh Yadav succeeded in emerging as the true inheritor of his father’s political legacy, he was unable to win the confidence of his father, Samajwadi party founder Mulayum Singh Yadav, and his uncle Shivpal Yadav who felt aggrieved at being summarily marginalised by the younger Yadav.

“It is his personal opinion, but, the Congress party has been supporting Mehrotra throughout in the polls”, he added. The India Today/Axis exit poll predicts the Congress will win between 62 and 71 seats and AAP wlil get between 42 and 51 seats. The ABP-CSDS poll gave the BJP 164-176 seats, the SP-Congress 155-169 and the BSP 60-72 seats.

Previous government of Congress and BJP consider the Maoist rebellion the biggest threat to India’s internal security.

Though Arvind Kejriwal had drawn a lot of media attention after his well-attended public rally in Panaji in May past year, AAP seemed to have been taken in by its own spin and divorced from ground realities.

“Agar sarkar ke liye zaroorat padegi, to koi nahi chahega ki President Rule lage yaan BJP remote se state chalaye (For the sake of governance, no one would want President’s Rule in the state or the BJP remote-controlling the government)”, he said. In-fighting in the Yadav family before heading to polls also marked a deep dent into the party’s votebank.

Akhilesh calls Mayawati as “Bua”.

Modi relied on his own charisma to clinch crucial votes in poor and agrarian Uttar Pradesh, but his campaign manager Amit Shah also takes credit for fielding the right candidates in a region where many people vote along caste and religious lines.

The turn of fortune for the party is being accredited to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts towards luring public towards social welfare schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, Gram Jyoti Yojana and the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojna, which we all launched in the states.

Asked whether the party will keep UP’s complex caste equation in mind when it decides its chief ministerial candidate, he said merit will be the sole criteria.