New Delhi: By returning to power after serving a full-five-year term in office as chief minister, Yogi Adityanath has scored many firsts in the politically important and crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.
As leads were firming up and results started pouring in on Thursday, it was clear as daylight that the ruling BJP has not only retained U.P. but also decimated the opposition parties, The main challenger Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav could not come up to expectations and could win only 133 seats though it gained by 81 seats in comparison to its 2017 poll performance. The Congress was reduced to just two seats and the BSP of Mayawati won just one seat.
On the other hand, fighting anti-incumbency the BJP looks all set to win at least 265 seats out of the total 403 seats and comfortably form the government. In the process, Yogi Adityanath became the first chief minister to have completed a full five-year term and returned to the office, creating history because it has not happened in the nearly past four decades.
Yogi Adityanatha also won from his home assembly segment of Gorakhpur Sadar. He broke another myth of visiting Noida and yet winning the election. In the past, chief ministers who visited Noida in the National Capital Region failed to come back to the office.
Perhaps for the first time, the BJP can find comfort in the fact that pro-incumbency worked for the party and its “double engine” development model as often referred to by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In the last two phases in Eastern U.P. or Purvanchal, PM Modi stepped up the campaign and held a massive roadshow in his parliamentary constituency of Varanasi. Purvanchal has 111 assembly seats and PM Modi knew the importance of giving a final push to the party’s campaign. It seems to have clearly worked wonders for the party. Though the tally came down by 57 seats as compared to its 2017 performance, the BJP can boast of increasing its vote share from 40 per cent to nearly 44.6 per cent this time.
For the Gandhi siblings — Rahul and Priyanka, the Congress failed to come up anywhere on the electoral scene. The party failed miserably and so was the fate of the BSP. The prospects of the SP have improved from 47 seats in 2017 to 133 seats, raising the stature of Akhilesh Yadav in the state but the party will have to toil on opposition benches of the assembly till 2027.
In Uttarakhand, the bigwigs like Harish Rawat of the Congress and the BJP chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami fell by the wayside though the BJP looks set to win 48 out of 70 seats.
In Goa and Manipur too, the BJP looks set to cross the halfway mark and form the government in these two states.