BJP & allies in UP win 224 seats with over 20,000 margin

NEW DELHI: The extent of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s sweeping victory in Uttar Pradesh, where it has won 325 of the 403 assembly seats along with its allies, can be gauged from the fact that it has won nearly 70% of these seats with hardly any contest.

From winning just 12 seats in the 2012 polls with a margin of more than 20,000 votes, the BJP-led alliance has won as many as 224 seats with such margins this time, as per analytical data put out by the Election Commission. This time, a total of 245 seats have been won by such margins, more than double the 111 seats in 2012, when the Samajwadi party had emerged victorious.

The BJP on its own won 216 seats with such margins out of the 384 it contested, while its alliance partners Apna Dal won six and the SBSP won two seats with margins exceeding 20,000 votes. Of the six candidates in UP who won by more than one lakh votes, five belonged to the BJP. The biggest win was for the BJP candidate from Sahibabad, Sunil Kumar, by 1.5 lakh votes, a margin unheard of in assembly polls.

Opposition parties including the SP, BSP and Congress failed to provide any resistance in more than two-thirds of the seats. SP won 78 seats with 20,000-plus margins while coming to power in 2012 but managed to repeat the feat in just 12 seats this time – it had contested only 311 seats this time compared to 401 last time.

SP’s best performers were Azam Khan and Shivpal Yadav, who won by 53,000 and 52,000 votes respectively, though with much lesser margins than in 2012. Some seats saw a complete turnaround of parties with the big margins – like Sri Nagar seat in Lakhimpur, which SP had won by almost 64,000 votes in 2012, but lost to the BJP this time by 55,000 votes.

BSP won only three seats with 20,000-plus margins and Congress won just two. Independent candidates, in fact, fared as well as the BSP on this count, winning three seats apiece with 20,000-plus margins. Raja Bhaiyya won from his traditional Kunda seat by 1.03 lakh votes, Amanmani Tripathi won the Nautwana seat by 32,000 votes and Vinay Kumar won from Babaganj by 37,000 votes.

The BJP’s margins suggest that a record number of candidates lost their deposits in this election, including from SP and BSP, although the EC has yet to put out data to this effect. A candidate’s deposit is forfeited if he or she is unable to secure even a sixth of valid votes polled.