LUCKNOW: Making its presence felt for the first time in the teachers’ constituency for the state legislative council elections, the ruling BJP made an impressive opening by winning three of the six seats.
While the main opposition Samajwadi Party won one seat, the remaining two — Gorakhpur and Agra — were won by independents. The saffron victory ended nearly 50-year dominance of eight-time MLC and UP Madhyamik Shikshak Sangh president Om Prakash Sharma in Meerut.
However, the BJP failed to perform in its bastion of Varanasi, which is the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where the SP wrested the seat. Besides Meerut, the BJP won the Lucknow and the Bareilly- Moradabad division teachers’ seats.
The BJP had fielded candidates on four of six teachers’ constituency seats of which they won three. The results of the six teachers’ constituencies were declared by the Election Commission late Friday night. As per the results declared by the Election Commission, BJP’s Umesh Dwivedi won the Lucknow division teachers’ seat, Shrichand Sharma the Meerut seat and Hari Singh Dhillon the Bareilly- Moradabad seat. SP’s Lal Bihari Yadav won the Varanasi teachers’ seat.
Akash Agrawal and Dhruv Kumar Tripathi, both independents, bagged the Agra and Gorakhpur teachers’ seats. The counting is still on for five seats belonging to the graduate constituencies. Of the five seats, the result of only one seat, Allahabad-Jhansi, has been declared. The seat, bagged by the SP, ended the 24-year dominance of the BJP. The counting for the five MLC seats under the graduates’ constituencies was under way.
Spread across assembly constituencies
Voters for these polls are spread across several districts and many assembly segments. In teachers’ constituency, government teachers for class 10 and above register themselves as voters while in graduate constituency polls, all graduates who graduated three years before the poll-date, are voters