BJP bags all 17 mayoral seats in UP urban polls

LUCKNOW: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday swept the urban local body (ULB) elections in Uttar Pradesh, winning all 17 mayoral seats, in a result that reaffirms chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s firm grip over the state’s politics, according to the state election commission (SEC).

The ruling party bettered its performance from 2017 ULB polls, when it won 14 of the 16 mayoral seats. This time, however, 17 mayoral seats were up for grabs, with Shahjahanpur being the new entrant after it became a municipal corporation in 2018, and the BJP won all of them, according to the state election commission (SEC).

“This is for the first time that the party has won all mayoral seats in Uttar Pradesh,” Adityanath told reporters at the BJP headquarters in Lucknow.

The mayoral seats won by the BJP are: Varanasi, Ayodhya, Vrindavan-Mathura, Gorakhpur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi, Bareilly, Moradabad, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Agra, Aligarh, Firozabad, Meerut, Ghaziabad and Shahjahanpur.

In 2017, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had won mayoral polls in Meerut and Aligarh.

Though the results came as a setback for opposition parties such as the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) alliance, as well as the BSP and the Congress, they did manage to win several nagar palika parishad (municipal councils) and nagar panchayat (town councils) seats.

Voting for all 760 local bodies was held in two phases on May 4 and May 11 with little over 52% of the 43.2 million eligible voters exercising their franchise.

The 760 ULBs include 17 municipal corporations, 199 municipal councils and 544 town councils.

According to the state poll body, the BJP won 812 corporator seats out of the total 1,420, followed by the Samajwadi Party (SP) that won 191. The BSP won 85, the Congress 77 while the remaining seats were won by other smaller parties and independents.

Of the 199 posts of municipal council chairperson posts on the offer, the BJP won 84, followed by SP (34), BSP (14) and the Congress four. Smaller regional parties and independents won the remaining seats.

Similarly, the BJP won 187 of the 544 nagar panchayat chairperson posts, with the SP coming a distant second with 77, followed by the BSP 37 and the Congress 13, the SEC said.

“The party will double and triple its performance vis-a-vis 2017 civic elections in nagar palikas, parishads and nagar panchayats, too,” Adityanath said even as the voting continued late into the night, attributing the party’s victory to the “good governance” of the “double-engine government” and development under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership.

The opposition Samajwadi Party (SP), meanwhile, accused the BJP of deliberately delaying the counting process.

“The BJP is using all kinds of tricks to win the elections in UP. It is deliberately delaying the counting process where its candidates seem to be losing…It is pressurizing polling officials for recounting at its preferred seats,” SP chief Akhilesh Yadav tweeted in Hindi.

“The BJP is winning due to faulty counting and not because of the voting.”

According to the SEC data, 83,378 candidates were in the fray for 14,684 posts across various categories in the state.

“Yogi Adityanath has proved his mettle once again in the Uttar Pradesh municipal elections as BJP is set to sweep it,” said SK Pandey, a political scientist.

“Maintaining its dominance in UP politics right from Lok Sabha to the Vidhan Sabha and now municipal elections, the BJP has made its presence felt in the Hindi heartland.”

In the ULB polls, the BJP fielded the maximum 10,758 candidates (including 4,248 women), followed by the Samajwadi Party with 5,231 candidates (2,223 women), BSP 3,787 (1,611 women). The Congress and the AAP fielded 2,994 (1,395 women) and 2,447 (1,031 women) candidates, respectively.

This is for the first time that the party has won all mayoral seats in Uttar Pradesh. YOGI ADITYANATH, Uttar Pradesh chief minister