Closely contested seats may hit BJP’s ‘Mission 80’ in UP

Of the 64 seats won by the BJP and its alliance partners in 2019, the victory margin on as many as ten LS seats was a few thousand votes with at least one seat (Machli Shahar) going to the BJP by a margin of merely 181 votes.

Lucknow: BJP’s much publicised slogan of ‘Abki baar 400 paar’ (this time 400 plus seats) will be depending mainly on its performance in Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Though the saffron party has, as part of its electoral strategy, roped in smaller, caste based outfits — setting its eyes on winning all the seats in the state, the task appears to be extremely difficult one.

A major roadblock in BJP’s way in its attempts to have a clean sweep in UP will not only be the strongholds of its main rival, the Samajwadi Party (SP), in the eastern and central regions of the state but also around a dozen LS seats where the saffron party had barely managed to scrape through by a few thousand votes in the 2019 LS polls.

In the previous LS polls, the BJP, with its alliance partners, Nishad Party and Apna Dal (Anupriya Patel), had won 64 seats. The SP and BSP, which had contested the polls in alliance, had won 15 seats while one seat was won by the Congress.

Of the 64 seats won by the BJP and its alliance partners, the victory margin on as many as ten LS seats was a few thousand votes with at least one seat (Machli Shahar) going to the BJP by a margin of merely 181 votes. On three such seats the BJP’s victory margin was less than ten thousand votes.

Similarly the BJP could win the Firozabad LS seat, considered to be a stronghold of the SP, by around 29 thousand votes. But in 2019 LS polls, Akhilesh’s uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav was in the fray here and he had polled over 91 thousand votes. This time, however, Shivpal is with Akhilesh and the BJP may face a tough fight in Firozabad.

The Shivpal factor had also impacted the SP in 2019 LS polls in its another stronghold of Kannauj where SP president Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav had lost to the BJP nominee Subrat Pathak by a little over 12 thousand votes. In Meerut LS constituency, BJP’s Rajendra Agarwal had defeated the SP candidate Haji Yaqoob by less than five thousand votes. Similarly BJP nominee Sanjiv Baliyan merely scraped through on Muzaffarnagar seat by a little over six thousand votes.

SP’s Dharmendra Yadav had lost the Badaun LS seat to BJP by over 18 thousand votes. Here also the nominee put by Shivpal had played a crucial role in SP’s defeat.

Similarly the BJP could win Ballia, Chandauli LS seats by less than 15 thousand votes.  Even former union minister and BJP candidate Maneka Gandhi could barely manage to win Sultanpur seat by a little over 14 thousand votes.

BJP leaders here said that the party had been working on these seats for the past five years and that its margin of victory would increase this time. The SP leaders, however, feel that with a little extra effort their party may wrest some of these seats from the BJP.

It is however certain that a close contest will be witnessed on all these seats this time.