The Samajwadi Party (SP) swept the three Lok Sabha seats that were up for grabs in the Uttar Pradesh bypolls yesterday, including the Gorakhpur seat vacated by chief minister Adityanath when he joined the state assembly past year.
While Praveen Nishad of SP won the Gorakhpur seat by 21,961 votes, party's candidate Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel defeated BJP's Kaushlendra Singh Patel by 59,460 votes in Phulpur LS bypoll.
Today's results may also shape the future alliance among the non-BJP parties in Uttar Pradesh as the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party had chose to back the Samajwadi Party candidate from both Gorakhpur and Phulpur. The victory will also come as a sweet revenge after chief minister Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) broke off a pre-poll alliance with the RJD and the Congress to return to the BJP-led NDA fold. In 2014, the party had got 45719 votes polled and had managed 4.3% vote share. The seat fell vacant after the death of actor-turned-politician Vinod Khanna. The defeat also showed that the BJP, which had swept the polls both in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and the 2017 Assembly elections in a multi-cornered contest, is highly vulnerable when the major political forces in the Opposition come together - something that was evident even during the 2015 Assembly elections in Bihar at the height of Modi's popularity. The BJP won the other (Bhabua) seat. Party candidate Upendra Shukla had sought votes the Chief Minister, saying it was a question of "respect" for the saffron-robed head of the temple that dominates the town. SP, of course, thanked BSP without whose support the results may have been starkly different.
A defeat in Gorakhpur is certainly going to be seen as a big loss for Yogi Adityanath as well as the BJP.
BSP did not field its candidates in the bypolls, but suddenly came into the focus, announcing support to the SP candidate nearly unexpectedly and with just a week to go for the polls.
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With these results, the BJP's tally in the Lok Sabha is set to come down to 272 seats. Indeed, Trinamool Congress leaders said that while it would be hard to keep the Congress out of any opposition alliance, there was no way it could be accepted as the lead player. "Unity among the non-BJP parties has played a key role", the Karnataka CM tweeted.
Five of these six seats were lost by the party in the past six months.
Keshav Prasad Maurya said the SP's victory was the result of BSP's ability to transfer its votes to the former.
Adityanath acknowledged that he had "failed to understand" the power of a Dalit-Yadav alliance in UP. For one, today's results will make it hard for the party to forge a major alliance for the 2019 election on its terms. One could underplay the BJP losses in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh by attributing them to anti-incumbency because the governments in these two states were in the last year of their five-year term.
Congress' Phulpur candidate Manish Mishra and Gorakhpur candidate Dr Sureetha could not save their deposits.
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