According to the state electoral commission (SEC), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won all 17 mayoral seats in the urban local body (ULB) elections held on Saturday in Uttar Pradesh, solidifying chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s hold on the state’s politics.
In the 2017 ULB votes, the governing party performed better than expected, taking 14 of the 16 mayoral seats. This time, however, there were 17 mayoral seats up for election, with Shahjahanpur as the new participant because it became a municipal corporation in 2018. According to the state electoral commission (SEC), the BJP won every one of them.
At the BJP headquarters in Lucknow, Adityanath told reporters, “This is the first time the party has won all mayoral seats in Uttar Pradesh.
Varanasi, Ayodhya, Vrindavan-Mathura, Gorakhpur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi, Bareilly, Moradabad, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Agra, Aligarh, Firozabad, Meerut, Ghaziabad, and Shahjahanpur are among the cities where the BJP has won mayoral seats.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won the elections for Meerut and Aligarh’s mayors in 2017.
Although the results were disappointing for opposition parties including the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) alliance, the BSP, and the Congress, they were nonetheless able to gain a number of seats in town and municipal councils (nagar panchayats).
On May 4 and May 11, there were two rounds of voting for all 760 local bodies, with slightly more than 52% of the 43.2 million eligible voters casting ballots. 17 municipal corporations, 199 municipal councils, and 544 town councils are among the 760 ULBs.
The Samajwadi Party (SP) came in second with 191 votes, followed by the BJP with 812 out of the 1,420 corporators’ seats, according to the state election commission. The BSP got 85 seats, the Congress 77, and other minor parties and independents gained the remaining seats.
The BJP won 84 of the 199 open positions for municipal council chairs, followed by the SP (34), BSP (14) and the Congress (4 positions). The remaining seats were won by independents and smaller regional parties. The SP finished in a distant second place with 77, followed by the BSP with 37, and the Congress with 13 positions, according to the SEC. Similarly, the BJP won 187 of the 544 nagar panchayat chairman positions.
Even as voting went late into the night, Adityanath declared, “The party will double and triple its performance vis-à-vis 2017 civic elections in nagar palikas, parishads, and nagar panchayats, too.” He credited the party’s success to “good governance” of the “double-engine government” and development under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership.
The BJP has been charged of purposefully delaying the counting process, according to the opposition Samajwadi Party (SP).
“The BJP is using a variety of strategies to win the UP elections. The counting process is being purposefully delayed where its candidates seem to be losing…Akhilesh Yadav, the leader of the SP, tweeted in Hindi that it was pressuring election authorities to recount votes in its chosen seats. “The BJP is winning because of inaccurate counting, not due to voting,”
83,378 applicants competed for 14,684 positions across a variety of categories in the state, according to SEC statistics.
Yogi Adityanath has once again shown his mettle in the municipal elections in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP is expected to triumph, according to political scientist SK Pandey. “The BJP has made its presence felt in the Hindi heartland, maintaining its dominance in UP politics from the Lok Sabha to the Vidhan Sabha and now municipal elections.”
The BJP fielded the most candidates in the ULB elections (10,758 total, including 4,248 women), followed by the Samajwadi Party (5,231, including 2,223 women), and the BSP (3,787, including 1,611 women). 2,994 (1,395) women ran for office in the Congress, whereas 2,447 (1,031) women ran in the AAP.
For the different positions in the urban local governments, a total of 35,102 women (or 42% of all candidates) are running, greatly above the 33% minimum mandatory reserve for women granted by the Constitution.
