The Bharatiya Janata Party has won 62 out of 78 Lok Sabha constituencies it contested in Uttar Pradesh, reducing the Congress to a single seat in India’s most populous state in the 2019 General Elections. However, the party’s tally this time was lower than the 71 seats it had won in the state in 2014.
The alliance of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party won 15 seats, 10 of them to the BSP. The alliance, which also included the Rashtriya Lok Dal, was expected to pose some challenge to the BJP, but failed to do so. Rashtriya Lok Dal chief Ajit Singh lost Muzaffarnagar to BJP’s sitting MP Sanjeev Balyan.
The BJP won 49.6% of all votes in the state, and the Congress got 6.3%. The Samajwadi Party had an 18% vote share, while the BSP’s was slightly better at 19.3%.
The only Congress candidate to win a seat was Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareli, where her victory margin was 1.67 lakh votes. The only other Congress MP from 2014 – her son and party chief Rahul Gandhi – lost family bastion Amethi to BJP leader Smriti Irani.
Uttar Pradesh sends the most members to the Lok Sabha – 80. The BJP had left two seats to ally Apna Dal (Soneylal), which is led by Anupriya Patel. The party won both seats it contested, lifting the National Democratic Alliance to 64 seats in Uttar Pradesh. Patel herself won Mirzapur by 2.32 lakh votes, while Pakauri Lal Kol won Robertsganj.
The BSP and the Samajwadi Party, led by former Chief Ministers Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav, along with Rashtriya Lok Dal, had formed an alliance to keep the BJP out of power, and had fielded candidates in 78 seats, leaving Rae Bareli and Amethi to the Congress.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will become the first leader to win the post with a simple majority twice in a row since 1971. By 9.30 am on Friday, the Election Commission of India has declared results in 525 of 542 constituencies. Modi’s BJP has won 296 of these. The party is ahead in seven of the other constituencies where counting is still under way.
In its heartland of mostly Hindi-speaking states – Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh – the BJP, along with its allies, won 243 out of 273 seats.
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Why did the Akhilesh Yadav-Mayawati experiment fail in Uttar Pradesh?
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