UP Assembly bypolls: SP wrests one seat, NDA gets three

The SP wrested the Zaidpur seat from the ruling BJP as votes were counted for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly bypolls on Thursday, while the saffron party retained the Balha and Lucknow Cantonment seats and its ally Apna Dal (S) held on to Pratapgarh, even as the results for seven other seats were yet to be announced.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was leading in five seats, while the Samajwadi Party (SP) was ahead in Rampur and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Jalalpur.

The first results came from Zaidpur, where SP's Gaurav Kumar defeated BJP's Ambrish by 4,165 votes and wrested the seat from the ruling party.

The Balha (reserved) seat was retained by the BJP, where the saffron party's Saroj Sonekar defeated her nearest rival, SP's Kiran Bharti, by a margin of 46,487 votes.

The Pratapgarh seat was declared in favour of Apna Dal (S) nominee Rajkumar Pal, who defeated SP's Brijesh Verma by 29,714 votes.

The BJP retained the Lucknow Cantonment seat, where Suresh Chandra Tiwari humbled his nearest rival of the SP by over 35,400 votes.

The seat was won by the ruling party's Rita Bahuguna Joshi in 2017, but she vacated it after winning the Lok Sabha polls held in April-May from Allahabad.

The Congress, which was leading after the initial rounds of counting in the Gangoh constituency, was overtaken by the BJP in the subsequent rounds.

The saffron party was also leading in Manikpur, Ghosi, Iglas and Govindnagar.

Of the 11 Assembly seats of the state where bypolls were conducted on Monday, eight were held by the BJP and one by its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal). The other two seats were shared by the SP and the BSP.

The bypolls were mostly necessitated after legislators got elected to the Lok Sabha. The Ghosi seat fell vacant following the resignation of MLA Phagu Chauhan, after he was appointed as the governor of Bihar.

The BJP currently has 302 members in the 403-member assembly, Apna Dal (Sonelal) eight, the SP 47, the BSP 18, while the Congress has seven.