The BJP is heading for a big win in biennial elections to the Uttar Pradesh legislative council or upper house, weeks after its record victory in state elections, but lost the key Varanasi seat.
Votes are being counted for 36 of 100 seats in the Uttar Pradesh legislative council. The BJP is ahead in more than 30 seats and is all set to win a majority in the upper house. It had already won nine seats unopposed.
For the first time in decades, the party will have a majority in both houses of the UP assembly.
In Varanasi, reports say that Annapurna Singh, the wife of local strongman Brijesh Singh has won the seat by a massive margin with the BJP candidate coming second.
In the 2016 election on this seat, Brijesh Singh had won as an independent but the BJP more or less gave him a walkover by not putting up a candidate. In this election, the BJP decided to contest and made the polls in the eastern UP city a prestige battle
But apart from the loss in Varanasi, it’s a win-win situation for the BJP, which just won a big majority in the state election with Yogi Adityanath becoming Chief Minister for the second time. Once results are formally declared, the party will enjoy a majority in both houses of the Uttar Pradesh legislature with over 60 seats
The Samajwadi Party has not managed to win a single seat in the election, among its candidates were Gorakhpur doctor Kafeel Khan, who was jailed earlier for his alleged role in the Gorakhpur oxygen deaths in 2017. Voters in these elections are MPs. MLAs, urban corporators and village level representatives like Pradhans. This is bad news for the party and its chief Akhilesh Yadav, right after the assembly election loss where the Samajwadi Party won a respectable 111 seats but could not dethrone the BJP that once again won a big majority
Chief Minister Adityanath, an MLC in the previous govt and now an MLA, also cast his vote for these elections from his home turf Gorakhpur. The BJP is winning the seat. For Mr Adityanath, the MLC elections victory will mean a reassertion of his own standing within the party, with favourable electoral results just a month after the big state election win
With inputs from NDTV
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