BJP sweeps UP urban local body polls, wins all 17 municipal corporations

BJP's alliance partner Apna Dal also won the two assembly by-polls at Chanbey and Suar seats

BJP had something to cheer after a severe drubbing in the Karnataka assembly elections as the saffron party swept the Uttar Pradesh urban local body polls winning the Mayoral seats of all the 17 municipal corporations besides 90 posts of municipality chairman and over 600 wards.

BJP's alliance partner Apna Dal (AD) also won the two assembly by-polls at Chanbey and Suar seats in the state defeating its nearest rivals from the Samajwadi Party (SP). The AD wrested the Suar seat from the SP while it retained the Chanbey seat in Mirzapur district.

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BJP candidates won the Mayors' seat in Lucknow, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Meerut, Saharanpur, Ayodhya, Kanpur, Bareilly, Moradabad, Agra, Aligarh, Firozabad, Gorakhpur, Ghaziabad, Jhansi, Mathura and Shahjahanpur. In the last urban local body polls the BJP had won 14 Mayoral seats. The BSP, which had won two Mayoral seats in the last polls, drew a blank this time.

SP nominees managed to win 34 municipal chairman seats followed by the BSP, which won 24 seats, according to the official sources here. The SP and BSP won 128 and 72 wards respectively in the municipal corporations. BJP won 201 Nagar Panchayat chairman seats while the SP won 88 seats. The BSP managed to win 21 seats of Nagar Panchayat chairman, according to sources.

The saffron party's victory with its alliance partner in the two assembly by-polls assumes political significance as one of the seats, Suar, which the BJP ally AD wrested from the SP, was considered to be a stronghold of firebrand SP leader Azam Khan and was part of the Rampur Lok Sabha seat. The AD had fielded a Muslim candidate from the seat while the SP had given the ticket to Anuradha Chauhan.

''It's a victory of our government's crackdown against the mafia elements and welfare measures for every section of the society without any discrimination,'' state BJP leader Shalabh Mani Tripathi said.

SP president Akhilesh Yadav alleged that the BJP had misused official machinery in the polls. ''At many places the SP supporters were not allowed to vote'' alleged a senior SP leader here.

The saffron party has spearheaded its campaign with the slogan of 'triple engine sarkar' (governments at the centre, state and local bodies) and touted the developmental works undertaken by the Yogi Adityanath government in the state along with the 'Hindutva'.