Ind finish second, steal a march over Oppn

LUCKNOW: Independents finished in second place behind the BJP in the civic polls, the results of which were declared on Friday.

The independents’ vote share of 20.4% was higher than that of the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress.

Independents cornered 28.59% of the seats of the nagar palika parishad chairmen and captured 19.82% of the total seats of the nagar panchayats chairmen upsetting political equations of established political parties.

In terms of vote share, the Samajwadi Party was third, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) fourth despite registering a stunning victory in Aligarh and Meerut Nagar Nigams and the Congress a distant fifth.

An analysis of the election results for the local urban body polls show that BJP remains the dominant force with 30.8% vote share.

The party received 5,474,028 of the total 17,765,721 valid votes polled in the nagar nigams, nagar nagar palika parishads and nagar panchayats (semi-urban

bodies).

The SP polled 3,190,723 or 18.4% of the total votes. The Bahujan Samaj Party got 2,547,153 votes accounting for 14.3% vote share.

The Congress, the grand old party, ended up getting just 10% of the vote share in 1,769,544 of the total votes cast for the three LUBs.

The civic poll results have demonstrated that the main political parties have maintained the same rank in terms of vote share that they had obtained in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

In the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP got 42.30% votes, the SP 22%, the BSP 19.6% and the Congress 7.50% vote share respectively.

In the assembly election, the BSP had dislodged the SP from the second slot by getting 0.2 % more.

In the assembly elections, the BJP polled 40% votes, SP 22%, BSP 22.2% and 6.2%.

“However, a comparison between vote share in Lok Sabha/Vidhan Sabha polls and the civic elections cannot be made just because their units of votes in the two elections are different,” said an official in the state election commission.