India News | After Dominant Byelection Win, CM Adityanath Puts BJP in Pole Position Again in UP

Lucknow, Nov 24 (PTI) Electoral politics is hard as the momentum shifts ever so quickly, more so in a politically sensitive state like Uttar Pradesh, where the results of the byelections in nine assembly seats have repositioned the ruling BJP in the pole position after a blip in the June 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

Having put in the hard yards with multiple rallies across all nine by-poll seats and assigning himself the responsibility of a difficult seat like Katehari in Ambedkarnagar that BJP won after three decades, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's stock has skyrocketed to the days when the BJP won a consecutive term in UP in 2022.

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Adityanath literally set the narrative for the bypolls in August itself with slogans like 'batenge toh katenge (divided we perish)' that were cleverly tailored to reinforce the Hindu unity pitch and resonated right through the mini polls.

"For a long time, Samajwadi Party's politics revolved around its 'MY' factor that was meant to denote a particular community and caste. The BJP has changed that with a new 'MY' approach. This 'MY' factor means Modi-Yogi and these two leaders are changing the political discourse with their development narrative, and this by-poll again showed the effectiveness of Yogi ji," UP BJP spokesman Manish Shukla told PTI.

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The party won six seats out of nine while ally RLD got one. Adityanath's 'batoge toh katoge' slogan made a huge impression was evident in the BJP's win in the Muslim-majority Kundarki seat in Moradabad. Here, the party had not won in three decades but this time voters consolidated behind BJP's Ramveer Singh, the lone Hindu among 11 Muslims in the fray.

“The SP took Muslims for granted and we went about telling the voters about SP leaders' claim that virtually anyone on their party's symbol would win.

"Eventually they realised that despite being unfairly demonised by our opponents, only BJP could get them out of the vote bank trap and of course our leadership helped,” Ramveer said.

The importance of Kundarki win was such that it even found a mention in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech at the BJP office in Delhi after the BJP-led-NDA's spectacular win in Maharashtra on Saturday evening.

“What it means is that while BJP vote bank consolidated, the SP's trusted Muslim vote bank that had voted for the party in big numbers both in 2022 UP polls as well as in 2024 Lok Sabha polls disintegrated. Brand Yogi has found a boost while Akhilesh Yadav has some work to do,” a senior BJP leader told PTI.

Even in its family bastion of Karhal seat in Mainpuri, which SP chief Akhilesh Yadav had himself won by an impressive margin of around 67000 votes in 2002 UP polls, the SP's vote bank dipped as party candidate and Akhilesh's nephew Tej Pratap Yadav won against Anujesh Yadav, also a distant relative of Akhilesh, by about 14000 votes.

The SP had alleged massive irregularities in voting and on its complaint the EC had suspended seven police officials in UP.

In Sishamau, Kanpur, the only other seat the SP won in the bypolls, the margin was even lesser – about 8000 odd – making it evident the main opposition party had lost the momentum gained after 2024 Lok Sabha poll results.

Back then the SP had won 37 seats against BJP's 33 in UP but the momentum, it appears, has quickly swung back in BJP's favour.

Meerapur assembly seat in Muzaffarnagar in west UP was another seat that had a sizeable Muslim presence. RLD had won the seat in 2022 UP polls when it was in alliance with SP, and has succeeded in retaining it after joining hands with the BJP.

"The RLD has a dedicated vote bank comprising all sections of society and people's belief in our leader Jayant Chaudhary showed again with a landslide win," RLD leader Rohit Agarwal told PTI.

The Congress, which announced support for SP, didn't contest the polls and though senior leaders on both sides said “all is well” with the alliance, at the local level discordant notes were heard.

These concerns primarily revolved around a lack of ground-level coordination; defeating the very purpose of coordination committees that were set up on October 25 to ensure that.

“There is nothing wrong with the alliance. The Congress helped us. The reason for the reverses was mainly due to rampant and blatant misuse of official machinery and the people would make BJP realise this in 2027 UP polls when SP comes to power,” Samajwadi Party's national secretary Arvind Singh ‘Gope' told PTI.

The BSP, led by four-time former UP chief minister Mayawati, suffered maximum embarrassment as its candidate badly lost the polls, opening the party again to the charge of being a ‘vote katva (vote cutter)'.

On Sunday Mayawati after alleging irregularities declared that her party won't contest any more bypolls – an announcement that meant little in the face of yet another political loss and party leadership's inability to arrest the slide.

“The BJP contested the polls as one unit unlike the opposition that was besieged with internal conflicts," Shukla said.

“What can one say about BSP? We all know that it has been the ‘B' team of BJP and this election too proved that as it contested the election not to win but to dent the chances of the INDIA bloc,” Congress secretary Shahnawaz Alam said.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)