Bhartiya Janata Party loses Gorakhpur and Phulpur seats to Samajwadi Party and Bihar's Araria seat to Rashtriya Janata Dal; retains Bhabhua Assembly seat
Samajwadi Party workers celebrate their success during counting for by-election in Phulpur (Allahabad) Lok Sabha seat outside a counting centre in Allahabad on Wednesday. Pic/AFP
In a stunning blow to the BJP ahead of the 2019 general elections, the party on Wednesday lost bypolls to all three Lok Sabha seats it contested, including its bastion Gorakhpur, and Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh, besides Araria in Bihar. The shocker for the BJP came days after its surprise win in three northeastern states, including Tripura, where it scripted history, demolishing the Left citadel of 25 years and forming its first government in the state.
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A consolidation of OBC, Dalit and Muslim votes powered Samajwadi Party (SP) candidates to victory in Gorakhpur, a seat represented by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for five successive terms, and Phulpur, which elected his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. BJP had won Phulpur for the first time. Both of them had won their seats by margins of over 3 lakh votes.
RJD legislators celebrate after the success of their party in Lok Sabha and Assembly by-polls outside Bihar Assembly in Patna. Pic/PTI
Samajwadi Party's Pravin Nishad defeated BJP's Upendra Dutt Shukla by 21,961 votes in Gorakhpur, the seat which was with the party since 1989, while Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel of SP clinched the Phulpur seat drubbing the saffron party's Kaushalendra Singh Patel by 59,460 votes. Lalu Prasad's RJD retained the Araria Lok Sabha seat where its nominee Sarfaraz Alam beat BJP's Pradeep Kumar Singh by over 60,000 votes, in a set-back for the JD(U)-BJP alliance, which went to the hustings for the first time after Nitish Kumar returned to the NDA fold.
In small consolation for the BJP, its candidate Rinki Rani Pandey retained the Bhabhua Assembly seat for the party, defeating her Congress rival Shambhu Singh Patel by about 14,000 votes. The RJD retained the Jehanabad Assembly seat, with its nominee Suday Yadav defeating his JD(U) rival Abhiram Sharma by more than 30,000 votes. Buffeted by the surprise defeat, Adityanath attributed it to "overconfidence" of the party and called for an in-depth analysis. "We failed to understand the implications of this alliance between SP and BSP that are as different as chalk and cheese in the middle of the elections as part of bargain for the Rajya Sabha elections," he said.
60,000
No. of votes by which RJD nominee Sarfaraz Alam beat BJP's Pradeep Kumar Singh in Araria
21,961
No. of votes by which SP's Pravin Nishad defeated BJP's Upendra Dutt Shukla in Gorakhpur
59,460
No. of votes by which SP's Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel defeated the saffron party's Kaushalendra Singh Patel in Phulpur
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