LUCKNOW: Even as the BJP scored a historic victory in UP, winning 73 seats out of the total 80 seats in the politically crucial state, the saffron party’s success meant that not even a single Muslim candidate could win from the state. And the failure of the Muslim candidates also made history, albeit in a negative sense.
There were six Muslim candidates in 2009. And the BSP and the SP had fielded more than three dozen Muslim candidates in the elections this time.
The BJP’s success story has impacted the Congress, the SP and the BSP the most-- only Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi could win on a Congress ticket from the state. Similarly, SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and his kin alone managed to surmount the BJP wave.
All the six UPA ministers from UP-- Beni Prasad Verma, Salman Khurshid , Shri Prakash Jaiswal, Pradip Jain Adiytya and R P N Singh-- lost miserably!
The BSP registered its worst performance by drawing a blank and RLD chief Chaudhary Ajit Singh , who was also the Union minister in the UPA Government also lost along with his son Jayant Chaudhary . The way the SP, the BSP and the RLD had performed miserably it is very clear that these political outfits had failed to retain their committed and core vote banks, which also deserted them to support the BJP candidates.
Barring the seats contested by Mulayam and his kin, the Yadavs switched their loyalty to the BJP.Similarly, the BSP’s Dalit vote bank too dumped their leadership and their party completely.
This is the second major setback to the BSP in the last two years-- first it lost the 2012 Assembly elections and this time despite having contesting more than 500 across the country, it failed to open its account. The party needs a deep introspection now as its social engineering with the Brahmins had proved a failure in 2012 and now even its core voters from the SC community have also abandoned it. The BJP had fielded Sanjiv Kumar Baliyan who is a riot accused and had been in jail. Baliyan won his seat from Muzaffar Nagar, which was worst hit in November’s communal riots by a huge margin of over four lakh votes . Similarly, Hukum Singh, who too had been accused of involvement in the riots, won from Kairana by over two lakh votes.