Workers from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh threw themselves into the first Diwali celebrations when Tuesday’s holiday finally ignored the curse of the elections with a strong performance that gave the party a psychological advantage before the series of major local polls faced in December. ahead.
The BJP held six of the seven seats by vote and the SP one in the 2017 assembly polls. The by-elections did not alter the equation.
The BJP was haunted by the curse since the 2018 Lok Sabha general election when SP defeated the ruling party. This time, there was no disgust.
The BJP quickly marketed its poll success as an endorsement of the ‘Yogi brand’ to acknowledge Prime Minister Yogi Adityanath’s series of online cadre connecting campaigns before addressing a rally in each of the seven seats of the polls alongside BJP state chief Swatantra Dev. Singh, for whom it was the first election since taking office.
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The BJP had rejected an offer from its allied party Nishad to allow it to feature criminal-turned-politician Dhananjay Singh as its symbol in Malhani, where Singh ranked second in the 2017 UP assembly polls.
The secondary elections would now be followed by a series of major elections at the local level. Following the elections for the graduate and teacher ballots on December 1, there would be a mini contest for the upper house of the state legislature, as the 11 MLC term ends on January 30 of next year, followed by polls. of the panchayat. probably in February.
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The 35-seat MLC (local body) elections would also take place before March 2022, just before the great battle for the UP assembly elections.
Experts felt that the poll results made it clear that the party would go to the 2022 UP polls with Yogi Adityanath as its face.
“Naturally, after winning, it is Brand Yogi who has gained strength. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the undisputed leader at the national level, in UP, Yogi, in my opinion, would be the face of the party in the 2022 elections, ”said Irshad Ilmi, a veteran journalist.
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While the main opposition leaders, such as the Secretary General of Congress and in charge of the UP, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the head of the Samajwadi Party, Akhilesh Yadav, and the President of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Mayawati, stayed away from the campaign. , the BJP mounted a heavy resistance campaign led by Yogi Adityanath, who addressed seven demonstrations in all constituencies followed by Senior Deputy Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, who addressed the demonstrations in five seats.
Chief Deputy Minister Dinesh Sharma also participated in the election campaign.
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Eight cabinet ministers, in addition to party officials and legislators, had camped in the constituencies. The state general secretary (organization) of the BJP, Sunil Bansal, also visited all the electoral districts to fine-tune the party’s plan.
In seats like Deoria, the BJP had issued a warning to dissidents not to violate the party line, experts said. Here, BJP rebel Ajay Singh, alias Pintoo, had run as an independent after the party rejected his claim on the seat that was represented by his father Janmejay Singh and whose death caused the secondary vote. For the same seat, the Samajwadi Party changed candidates at the last minute, although the BJP also surprised its opponents by opting for a party worker, Satyaprakash Mani Tripathi, an assistant professor of political science, to start an interesting battle in which all the major political parties had put forward a Brahmin candidate.
“In a way, the BJP victory in Deoria amidst an all-Brahmin cast of other parties also solved the problem that the Brahmins were unhappy with the current dispensation. The opposition conspiracy to label Yogi Adityanath’s government anti-Brahmin, especially after the encounter with Bikru, failed. Had it been true, the results would have been markedly different in both Deoria and Ghatampur, “said BJP lawmaker Vijay Bahadur Pathak, who is also vice chairman of the party’s state unit.
“The BJP had won the Ghatampur (reserved) assembly seat in 2017 after four decades, and therefore retaining the seat was special,” he added.
“It is a victory for good government,” said UP Minister Mohsin Raza, who had campaigned especially in Bangermau, Unnao, where the BJP denied a ticket to the family of his former MLA Kuldeep Sengar.
The seat was left vacant after Sengar was disqualified from the assembly following his conviction in a rape case in December last year.
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