In the 2017 assembly elections, Congress was third in Ghatampur (Representational)
Lucknow:
One day after the declaration of the results of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, in which the Congress failed to win any of the seven seats, the party consoled itself by running in two constituencies where it finished as runner-up.
Congressional candidates Arti Bajpai in Bangarmau and Kripa Shankar in Ghatampur came second behind the BJP in the by-elections.
“There may not be a tectonic shift towards the party in the assembly by elections, but there is a gradual and visible shift among state voters towards Congress,” said UP Congressional spokesman Ashok Singh.
“We are number two in two places compared to BSP, which finished number two only in Bulandshahr,” he told PTI on Wednesday.
In the 2017 assembly elections, Congress was third in Ghatampur. In Bangarmau, he had then extended his support to the SP, whose candidate finished second.
The ruling BJP has retained six of the seven seats and the Samajwadi Party held on to the one it held before the November 3 elections were called.
The by-elections were held in the context of a campaign by the opposition, particularly by Congress, on the situation of law and order in the state led by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
AICC Secretary General Priyanka Gandhi Vadra repeatedly attacked the Yogi Adityanath government over the Hathras case in which a Dalit woman died after an alleged gang rape.
Compared to 2017, the BJP vote percentage dropped slightly in four of the six constituencies it won.
But he still got 36.73 percent of the votes from the seven constituencies, compared with a meager 7.53 percent for Congress.
The percentage of votes for the SP in the by-elections was 23.61% and that of the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati was 18.97%.
The Azad Samaj party of Bhim’s army chief Chandrashekhar Azad ran from Bulandshahr to test their electoral popularity. His candidate came in third place there with a 6.69 percent vote share, just a shadow below the Congressional average across all seven seats.
The BJP’s vote share fell in Bangarmau, Deoria, Ghatampur and Tundla, and was close to its 2017 performance in Naugawan. His participation improved in Bulandshahr.
The Samajwadi Party won Malhani, retaining its seat in the elections. He obtained 35.45 percent of the votes in this constituency, improving his previous performance by two percentage points.
This was despite an improvement in the vote share from his main rival, independent candidate Dhananjay Singh. This time he got 33.22 percent of the vote, compared to 23.37 percent of the vote in 2017, when he ran for the same seat as the Nishad party candidate.
The BSP’s best performance this time was at Bulandshahr, where its candidate finished second, the same place he reached in 2017.
In 2017, the SP and Congress fought together under their seat-sharing agreement for Uttar Pradesh.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated channel.)
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