SP, BSP face challenge in Assembly bypolls

After facing a rout in the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, the biggest challenge before the Samajwadi Party and the BSP are the byelections to 13 Assembly seats that have become inevitable after the victory of 12 BJP MLAs and one Apna Dal MLA in the Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP had fielded 12 legislators and all of them have won the Lok Sabha elections. The winning legislators include Hukum Singh ( Kairana), Kalraj Misra ( Deoria), Raghav Lakhanpal ( Saharanpur), Kunwar Sarvesh Singh ( Moradabad), Dr Mahesh Sharma ( Gautam Buddha Nagar), Ajay Misra Teni ( Lakhimpur) , Uma Bharti ( Jhansi), Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti ( Fatehpur), Savitri Bai Phule ( Bahraich), Kunwar Bhartendu ( Bijnore), Keshav Maurya ( Phulpur) and Dr Nepal Singh ( Rampur). The lone Apna Dal MLA Anupriya Patel has also been elected to the Lok Sabha from Mirzapur.

Byelections in all these 13 seats will be held in the coming months along with the byelection to either Azamgarh or Mainpuri, Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav has won both the seats and will have to vacate one of the two. These byelections are a major challenge for the ruling SP, which has faced a humiliating defeat in the just concluded general elections. The party also lost all four byelections to Assembly seats that were held along with the Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress won the Rampur Khaas Assembly seat while the BJP won the Vishwanathganj ( Pratapgarh), Fatehpur and Unnao seats. Three of these four seats had been held by SP while one by Congress.

“We will need to win these Assembly bypolls in order to keep the morale of party cadres high. The party and its leaders are extremely demoralised by the Lok Sabha results and we will need to work twice as hard to retrieve lost ground,” admitted a SP leader.

The biggest challenge for the SP will be to retain the LS seat that Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav vacates. The SP, incidentally, had fielded 14 MLAs, including seven ministers, and all of them have lost miserably in their constituencies.