Uttar Pradesh was swept by a saffron tsunami on Saturday as the Bhartiya Janata Party won 323 seats in Assembly elections 2017. It was leading on one seat which would take its tally to 324. In the process the party decimated its political rivals, by halting the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance at 55 seats and the Bahujan Samaj Party at a mere 19 seats.
It is for the first time in the history of the UP Vidhan Sabha that any party has notched a tally of 324. The last highest score of 304 seats was in 1980, in which the Congress had won. Even the BJP at the height of the Ram Janambhoomi movement could not touch the 324 mark. It could win 211 seats. The RJB movement however had laid a strong foundation for and established the presence of the saffron party in the Hindi heartland.
Saturday's victory was a culmination of this and a host of other factors, the chief being a silent Modi wave, the excellent social engineering by the BJP and RSS stalwarts which saw the Dalit votes being weaned away from the BSP and the Yadav votes from the SP in addition to the coalescing of the Other Backward Castes and the non-Jatav Dalits, to the BJP. The BJP's developmental agenda apparently struck a chord with the electorate, backed as it was with the slogan 'Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas', though the party refrained from giving a ticket to any member from the Muslim community, despite the Muslims accounting for 19 per cent of the population and being integral to the development of the state.
If the BJP's slogan struck a chord with the people, SP's national president Akhilesh Yadav's kaam bolta hai slogan came a cropper. His touting of the Lucknow-Agra Expressway and the Lucknow Metro (yet to take off ) as the 'development work' done by him had few takers, even in the Yadav heartland of Etawah, Mainpuri, Kannauj, Etah and Firozabad. The party has suffered a defeaning defeat, in constituencies which were once considered the Yadav strongholds, leading credence to the theory that there was a strong anti-incumbency against him.
The Yadav family feud apart, Akhilesh's calculated risk of striking an alliance with the Congress also came unstuck. The Congress which began its initial campaign against the SP and the BSP with the slogan '27 saal UP behaal' had to move in reverse gear once the alliance came through. The 'UP ke do ladke' could do little for the fortunes of their respective parties. The Congress faced a tough situation in its pocket borough of Amethi and Rae Bareli. Significantly, Congress president Sonia Gandhi refrained from campaigning in the just concluded polls while her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra made a brief appearance once in Rae Bareli.
Some amongst the prominent losers and winners are as follows: Aparna Yadav, daughter- inlaw of Mulayam Singh Yadav who contested on an SP ticket from Lucknow Cantonment. She lost to BJP's Rita Bahuguna Joshi by a margin of over 33,000 votes. Ashutosh Tandon, son of BJP senior leader Lalji Tandon won from Lucknow East.
Swati Singh of the BJP won from the Sarojninagar constituency. Singh had shot into prominence when she took on Mayawati. Shivpal Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party has won from Jaswantnagar. Azam Khan, the SPs Muslim mascot has won from Rampur.
Mukhtar Ansari who contested on a BSP ticket has won from Mau while his son Abbas Ansari, also from the BSP lost from Ghosi. Sibghatullah Ansari, brother of Mukhtar Ansari has lost from Mohammadabad.
The BJP won three of the four seats of Amethi, the Gandhi family's political borough. Amita Singh of the Congress suffered a defeat at the hands of Garima Singh of the BJP in Amethi.
Interestingly, in Deoband (Saharanpur), the BJP established its presence with a victory scored by its candidate Kunwar Brijesh Singh. Raghuraj Pratap singh alias Raja Bhaiya has won as an Independent from Kunda.
It was a clean sweep for the BJP in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home turf.
Like in the 2012 parliamentary elections, the Modi wave swept 52 out of 71 seats of western UP with the only major setback coming in the Kairana and Meerut, where the party's heavy-weight candidates Mriganka Singh and Laxmi Kant Vajpayee lost to their rivals. Out of 71 seats of western UP BJP had won 52, SP 15, Congress 2 and the BSP managed a single seat. In the last Assembly election, the BJP managed to win just 12 seats in the region.