Lucknow Bureau
LUCKNOW, May 13. Bharatiya Janata Party has swept the municipal bodies elections in Uttar Pradesh as Yogi magic held sway across the State. In a major shot in the arm for the Yogi Government, the party bagged all 17 municipal corporation mayoral seats in the state.
The BJP candidates also won from Meerut and Aligarh, which the party had lost during the last civic bodies elections. Besides, BJP’s Archana Verma was elected as the first Mayor of Shajahanpur, which went to polls for the first time this year after becoming a municipal corporation.
It is noteworthy that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had made a fervent appeal to the people to vote for the BJP candidates to add the third engine to the double engine Government in the state during his marathon campaigning.
Out of the 17 mayoral candidates fielded by the BJP, 14 were new while the party had placed bets on the outgoing mayors in Kanpur, Bareilly and Moradabad. The party won all the 17 seats as people voted for the developmental works being carried out by the Yogi Government.
Four BJP candidates achieved the distinction of becoming Mayors for the second time. While Pramila Pandey from Kanpur, Vinod Agarwal from Moradabad and Umesh Gautam Anwarat from Bareilly became the Mayor for the second time in a row, Harikant Ahluwalia has been the Mayor of Meerut earlier also. BJP’s Bihari Lal was the first to win in Jhansi. He got a total of 123503 votes. Other candidates who contested the election lost even their deposits.
CM Yogi Adityanath held a total of 50 rallies to campaign for BJP candidates in the municipal elections. The Chief Minister held public meetings in 10 municipal corporation areas falling under 9 divisions. Yogi Adityanath held a total of 28 rallies in the first phase, which included participating in rally cum conferences at 4 places in Gorakhpur, 3 in Lucknow and two in Varanasi. Voting took place on May 4 in 37 districts during the first phase. For the second phase of polls held on May 11 for seven municipal corporations of nine divisions, CM Yogi held 22 rallies. He held public meetings twice in Ayodhya. The presence of the CM in the Sant Sammelan played a big role in the candidate’s victory.
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SP faces humiliating defeat
For the Samajwadi Party and its chief Akhilesh Yadav, the civic bodies elections in Uttar Pradesh have turned out to be a nightmare. The SP leader’s continuous rant against the CM Yogi’s vision of all-round development of the state and the party’s support to mafias, enraged people of the state so much that they brought the SP to ‘zero’ once again.
Just like the last civic bodies polls in 2017, this time also the account of Samajwadi Party could not even be opened in the municipal corporations. Last time, BJP had won 14 out of 16 seats and BSP had won two while this time BJP has bagged all the 17 mayoral seats in municipal corporations. The people of Uttar Pradesh have once again demonstrated their trust in Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s leadership while rejecting SP and its leader Akhilesh Yadav completely.
While BJP has captured all the municipal corporations of the state, SP was not even remotely in the fight, except for one place, belying all speculations of a tough contest between the two parties.
BJP directly defeated SP on 10 out of 17 seats, while in the remaining 7, SP was seen at number three and fourth. The situation was such that on many seats the candidates of the SP lagged behind even the independents. In 2017 also, the Samajwadi Party had fielded its candidates on all the 16 municipal corporations seats, but had failed to open its account. BJP has also won the two seats of Meerut and Aligarh which the BJP had lost to the BSP in the last election. Back then, the condition of the Samajwadi Party was such that its candidates stood second only on three seats, and all the other SP candidates stood third or fourth.
The Samajwadi Party did not learn a lesson despite the humiliating defeat in the municipal elections in 2017 and had almost accepted its defeat even before the elections were held. While on one hand, CM Yogi held three-four election rallies on an average daily, on the other, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav kept waiting for an auspicious time to go to people. As a result, by the time he entered the field for the election campaign, the SP’s fort had collapsed.
Neither Akhilesh’s election rallies showed any effect nor Dimple Yadav’s road shows. In fact, wherever Akhilesh and Dimple campaigned, the SP had to face even more crushing defeat. Besides, making fun of the large-scale development works done by the Yogi Government in the state, calling them his own and showing a soft attitude towards the mafia also cost Akhilesh heavily.
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