Two decades after the Hindutva firebrand Yogi Adityanath won the Gorakhpur constituency, the Samajwadi Paty-Bahujan Samaj Party combine on Wednesday dealt a shock to the Bhartiya Janata Party, winning on the UP chief minister’s home turf. The mini-earthquake struck the party where it was least expected — in the constituencies of UP chief minister and deputy chief minister, sending party president Amit Shah and others into a huddle.
Samajwadi Party candidate Praveen Kumar Nishad, backed by the BSP, defeated the BJP candidate, Upendra Dutt Shukla by over 26000 votes. The verdict came as an ignominy to the ruling party in the state, just a year after it swept the assembly election, bagging over 300 seats.
The BJP led the Gorakhpur seat by a wafer-thin margin in the beginning, but once the SP candidate took the lead, there was no stopping the SP-BSP juggernaut.
The drubbing for the saffron party comes in the backdrop of a series of defeats in Lok Sabha by-elections in several states, most recently in Rajasthan. Interestingly, the BJP has not won a single Lok Sabha by-poll since 2016, exemplifying voter’s disappointment with the party. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi charms people with his eloquence and promises, his failure to convert those words into reality has forced the voter to look for an alternative again.
Gorakhpur, the seat Adityanth represented in the parliament for well over 20 years, was a witness to the deaths of over 60 children at the BRD college in 2017. A year later, the confidence among the electorate seems to have eroded completely. The result is particularly embarrassing for the UP CM because the BJP has used him as the Hindutva mascot to campaign in states such as Gujarat, Tripura, and Nagaland, but he failed to convince voters in his own constituency.
Phulpur, previously held by the deputy CM of Uttar Pradesh Keshav Prasad Maurya, was another constituency that elected Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel, an SP candidate. The run-up to the Uttar Pradesh by-polls was marred by a series of controversial statements, including that of CM Yogi Adityanath who had said that he “didn’t celebrate Eid, for he was a proud Hindu”. Patel defeated BJP’s Upendra Dutt Shukla by over 59,000 votes.
Samajwadi Party MP Ramgopal Yadav praised efforts of BSP workers who backed the SP candidates in Gorakhpur and Phulpur. When asked if he would explore the possibility of this SP-BSP alliance in future, Yadav told NDTV: “Just wait and watch”.
Disappointment for the BJP came from Bihar, too, where the two parliamentary seats — Arariya and Jehanabad — were retained by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), a setback for the Nitish Kumar-led Janta Dal (United). RJD’s Sarfaraz Alam won in Arariya by over 50,000 votes while Kumar Krishna Mohan won in Jehanabad by 35,000 votes.
UP by-poll result has once again set the ball rolling for a possible pre-poll alliance between SP, BSP and Congress before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The election results in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have once again foregrounded the significance of strong regional parties, with analysts predicting a close contest in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Another noticeable trend is that while the BJP, in the past three years, has gained momentum in unchartered territories, it has not shown similar signs in states where it is incumbent.
This trend seems to have exerted further pressure on the ruling party in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where it has been in power for fifteen and five years respectively. This major upset in UP signifies that the voter is compelled to weigh in alternatives after a panoply of disastrous policy measures, including the demonetisation and poor implementation of the Goods and Services Tax, announced by Narendra Modi.