Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
By Prateekmalviya20 (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

The UP and Bihar bypolls saw a strange turn of events for BJP. The counting midway began revealing that BJP would not catch up to the BSP-SP combine in UP and RJD in Bihar. An important takeaway was that BJP might have won the northeast but lost where it always seemed to have two feet in.

For CM Yogi Adityanath this must have come as a huge blow. Samajwadi Party’s Nagendra Pratap Singh won by a margin of over 59,000 votes in Phulpur. In Gorakhpur, it was again Samajwadi Party’s Praveen Nishad who won, with a margin of 21,881 votes. SP, of course, thanked BSP without whose support the results may have been starkly different.

SP is looking at this victory as a “rejection of both Yogi Adityanath and PM Narendra Modi”. This has clearly put a dent in BJP’s winning spree. BJP though is looking at this as a valuable lesson ahead of 2019,”We had not seen the Samajwadi Party and BSP coming together but since we have come to know of this now…and though there is still a long time (ahead of the polls)…we will redraw our strategy keeping this factor in mind,” said Sidharth Nath Singh, cabinet minister in the U.P. government.

It was not just a the BSP and SP combine that brought about BJP’s downfall but the voter turnouts as well in these regions were fewer. Lalu Yadav’s RJD came out on top in Bihar putting another thorn in BJP’s hide. In Bhabua though BJP found some relief where they won. But the loss will not easily be forgotten. There have been mixed reactions to the results, but of course, for the opposition, it signifies a ray of hope.

By Sahitya