Lucknow: The BJP, even while failing by a small margin to repeat its 2014 general election tally, registered an even bigger achievement by defeating Congress president Rahul Gandhi in his long-held constituency of Amethi.
By evening, the BJP had won 60 of the state’s 80 seats, two were won by its ally Apna Dal (S), 11 seats had gone to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), five to the Samajwadi Party (SP), one each to Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and Congress.
Congress leader Sonia Gandhi won from Rae Bareli – the only seat for her party. For the SP, Mulayam Singh Yadav won from Mainpuri, Akhilesh Yadav from Azamgarh, former UP minister Mohd Azam Khan from Rampur, ST Hasan (Moradabad) and Shafiqur Rahman Barq (Sambhal). The BSP won from Ambedkarnagar, Amroha, Bijnore, Ghazipur, Ghosi, Jaunpur, Lalganj, Machhlishahar, Shrawasti, Saharanpur and Nagina. Anupriya Patel and Pakauri Lal Kol, both from AD (S) won from Mirzapur and Robertsganj, respectively.
In 2014, the BJP had won 71 seats while two had gone to AD (S), five to the SP and 2 to the Congress, even as the BSP and RLD had failed to open their account.
This time the SP and BSP had contested the election as an alliance, along with RLD. Clearly, while the BSP managed to derive whatever advantage it could from the experiment, the SP came down from the 2014 tally by one. What added to the embarrassment for the SP was the fact that three members of Mulayam’s family – all sitting MPs - lost this time: Dimple Yadav (Akhilesh Yadav’s wife from Kannauj), Dharmendra Yadav and Akshay Yadav (both Mulayam’s nephews) from Badayun and Firozabad. Jayant Chaudhary of the RLD lost from Baghpat and his father the veteran Ajit Singh lost from Muzaffarnagar.
The biggest upset, however, was the defeat of Rahul Gandhi at the hands of Union minister Smriti Irani by a margin of about 48,000 votes. With this defeat, the 39-year-old association of Amethi with the Gandhi family came to an end. it was more of a generational shift, since the overriding sentiment among the younger voters in Amethi during the campaign was that of disdain towards Rahul for not having done enough for Amethi.
Smriti Irani, on the other hand, had been regularly coming to Amethi after losing the 2014 election, and had established a personal rapport with women and young people of the area. For the latter, an emotional bonding with Gandhi family and the Congress party, clearly, was not enough. Smriti Irani is known to have helped the people get their work done such as jobs, scholarships, problems with the local administration, etc.
Amethi was first won by the Congress in 1980 by Sanjay Gandhi but after his death, Rajiv Gandhi won the seat in a by-election in 1981 and retained it in 1984, 1989 and in 1991. In 1991 and 1996, Captain Satish Sharma, a close aide of the Gandhi family, won the seat but in 1998, the BJP wrested the seat when Sanjay Singh was elected. A year later, Sonia Gandhi entered politics and won the Amethi seat which she retained till 2004. Rahul Gandhi won the seat in 2004, 2009 and 2014.
Interestingly, most exit polls on May 19 had predicted the BJP-led NDA to win a second term comfortably. For UP, the predictions had ranged from 65 to 33 for NDA. Even though the BJP fell short of its all-time high tally of 71 in 2014, the SP-BSP alliance also failed to equal their individual tally of 2009. In 2009 election, the SP had won 23 and BSP 20, against 21 for the Congress and 5 for Rashtriya Lok Dal, leaving BJP with a mere 10 seats.
The SP-BSP alliance at least checked a clean sweep in UP, as has been seen in states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka. In these states, the opposition Congress has managed to win only 1 to 5 seats each.
Except for a few wins of the SP and BSP, the results indicated that voters had disregarded caste and community differences while supporting the BJP. The most important of such results are from Ghazipur, where Union minister Manoj Sinha lost to BSP’s Afzal Ansari in the predominantly Muslim constituency. Similar result came from Rampur, where Mohd Azam Khan of the SP defeated Jaya Prada of BJP, Haji Fazlur Rehman (BSP) defeated Raghav Lakhanpal (BJP) from Saharanpur, and Shafiqur Rehman Barq (SP) defeated Parmeshwari Lal Saini of BJP from Sambhal.
Among the remarkable wins was that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Varanasi over Shalini Yadav of the SP by more than 4.80 lakh votes. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh defeated Poonam Sinha of the SP by about 4.40 lakh votes. In both these places, the Congress nominees were a distant third.
Interestingly, the resentment against the performance of the state BJP government headed by Yogi Adityanath also did not appear to have reflected in the results. Issues of stray cattle, farmers’ neglect, law and order etc apparently did not matter much against the issues of nationalism and national security raised to a high pitch by Modi.
