A month after winning the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections with a landslide victory, the ruling BJP has clean swept the state’s legislative council polls.
It also bagged key seats of Barabanki and Ayodhya but lost key Varanasi seat to an Independent candidate.
Biennial elections on 36 seats of the Upper House were held in Uttar Pradesh a few days ago. The state’s legislative council has 100 seats. On nine seats, the BJP nominees won unopposed, while voting took place on the remaining 27 seats on April 9.
Nine MLCs seats where BJP won unopposed are Budaun, Hardoi, Kheri, Mirzapur-Sonbhadra, Banda-Hamirpur, Aligarh, Bulandshahr and Mathura-Etah-Mainpuri.
UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath congratulated the newly-elected members. Taking to Twitter, he said, “Hearty congratulations and best wishes to all the newly elected members of the Upper House of Uttar Pradesh.”
The voters in this biennial election are village pradhans, members and chairman of block development councils and Zila panchayats, and corporators in urban areas. MLAs and MPs also vote.
Meanwhile, the opposition Samajwadi Party has not managed to win a single seat in the election. Akhilesh Yadav’s party, SP, had fielded doctor Kafeel Khan, who was jailed earlier for his alleged role in the Gorakhpur oxygen deaths in 2017.
In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, BJP’s Sudama Patel stood at a distant third with just 170 votes as Independent candidate Annapurna Singh secured a resounding victory with 4,234 votes, followed by Samajwadi Party’s Umesh Yadav, who received 345 votes, Varanasi District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma said.
The Congress and the BSP did not field any candidate in the Legislative Council elections, making it a direct fight between the BJP and the SP, the principal opposition in the state assembly.
Of the 36 BJP candidates, five are former SP leaders, who joined the saffron party ahead of the Assembly polls.
(With PTI inputs)
