UP by-polls: Congress loses deposits

This is when both the central and state government are under BJP’s control. Thus, despite a potentially existential threat from the expansion of the BJP, the parties did not set about working together – even though the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (United) had managed to turn that into a winning anti-BJP formula in Bihar in 2015, only for the Janata Dal (United) to break off the alliance past year.

Gorakhpur was vacated by Adityanath and Phulpur by his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya, following their election to the Uttar Pradesh state legislative council.

This is the first time in 29 years that the BJP hadn’t named a representative of the Gorakhnath Mutt as its candidate, which commentators attribute for the BJP’s poor showing.

As per latest trends, the SP is leading in both the seats.

Praveen Nishad – son of the president of the Nishad Party and a prominent political face in UP, Dr. Sanjay Kumar Nishad – fought on an SP ticket and defeated the BJP’s candidate, Upendra Datt Shukla, with a margin of more than 21,000 votes.

In Phulpur Lok Sabha seat, Samajwadi Party’s Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel is leading by 12,231 votes with 99,557 votes as against BJP’s Kaushlendra Singh Patel who is second with 87,326 votes after eight round of counting. The defeat in Gorakhpur is all the more galling as the BJP had won this seat seven consecutive times and Yogi Addityanand had been elected from this constituency five times.

However, according to the Lok Sabha secretariat, the BJP has 274 members and the party needs 272 MPs for a simple majority on its own.

“SP, BSP and Congress were separate, but in the middle of the elections, they came together”. We failed to gauge the impact of SP-BSP alliance.

“This shows the return of caste politics in Uttar Pradesh”. Both were won by the Samajwadi Party. The result of the byelections came out on Wednesday.

Insisting that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi were the main architects of a broader anti-BJP coalition and every leader of the friendly party will take this as their victory – be it Sharad Pawar or Mamata Banerjee or Lalu Prasad, the party leadeer said: “Don’t presume the Congress will be left out in the lurch in the broad alliance”. “Congratulations to the winners of today’s by-elections”. Were the by-polls results an indication of the mood of the people of Uttar Pradesh?

He also said the Congress was keen to rebuild the party in Uttar Pradesh but added it would “not happen overnight”.

As it became clear that the BJP was headed for a twin rout, overjoyed Samajwadi Party activists and leaders took to the streets in Phulpur and Gorakhpur to celebrate. Not only will it convince the Doubting Thomases within the Opposition ranks about the vulnerability of the BJP when faced with a united Opposition, it may even force some of the BJP’s present allies to start thinking whether it would be politically prudent on their part to stick to the NDA anymore given the way political wind appears to have changed course. The by-poll in the parliamentary seat was necessitated after the death of sitting BJP MP Dileep Singh Bhuria. The BSP won 19 seats with 22.2 per cent votes. After all, he himself had recently dubbed the UP by-polls as “a dress rehearsal” for the next general elections, a remark which he must be ruing now.

The rare tie-up between Akhilesh Yadav’s SP and Mayawati’s BSP is also being seen as a test case for a larger Opposition grouping before the 2019 general elections.