LUCKNOW: Who can better understand the significance of every single vote but those who had to taste the defeat despite being at the thresh hold of victory.
They ended up losing their seat by an extremely slender margin of even less than 500 votes.
In UP, the BJP emerged victorious and became the only party to have repeated a term after 37 years in state polity. Results show that the race for Lucknow has been won on tighter margins than what they were five years ago. The fight was so close that at least on 15 of 403 seats, the victory-defeat gap was less than 1000 votes. Of the 15 seats, at least 11 candidates won their seats with less than 500 votes.
In Uttar Pradesh, the median margin of victory came down to 18,144 in 2022 as compared to 25,759 in 2017. While BJP lost six seats with a margin of under 1000 votes, Samajwadi Party had to face drubbing on nine such seats. In 2017, around eight candidates had won the seats with a margin under 1000 votes, in 2022, the number of such candidates has doubled.
On a majority of seats, the contests was bipolar between the BJP and SP candidates. They fought the battle of lakhs of votes but the margin of defeat or victory shrunk to a few hundred or a thousand in the end.
Dhampur seat in Bijnor witnessed a fierce battle of ballot wherein BJP’s Ashok Kumar Rana won but with a margin as thin as 203 votes. Here the SP candidate Naeemul Hassan of SP garnered 81,588 votes. On this seat, 834 voters pressed NOTA.
Similarly, on the Kursi seat in Barabanki, SP stalwart Beni Prasad Verma’s son Rakesh Verma was not fortunate enough to sail through and he was defeated by BJP Sakendra Pratap Verma by a margin of just 213 votes. Swami Omvesh of SP defeated his nearest rival Kamlesh Saini of BJP in the Chandpur seat in Bijnor by a margin of 234 votes. While BJP Kamesh Saini got around 90000 votes but she could not sail through. Here 854 voters went with NOTA.
Similarly, on around 53 seats, the margin of victory has remained less than or up to 5000. On 51 seats, the margin has been over 50,000 votes. Of these 51, while the BJP won 44, six have gone to SP while one seat of Mauranipur has been won by BJP ally Apna Dal (S).
Among the SP candidates fielded on 347 seats, Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party-Lohia (PSP-Lohia) chief and Akhilesh Yadav’s uncle Shivpal Yadav registered the biggest victory by a margin of 90,979 votes from his traditional Jaswantnagar seat in Etawah. Shivpal had contested the election on the SP symbol and got around 1.5 lakh votes. However, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav too got around 1.48 lakh votes but the margin of his victory was 67,000.
On the other, two of the BJP candidates—Sunil Kumar Sharma in Sahibabad (Ghaziabad) and Pankaj Singh (Noida) – created records by defeating their respective rivals from SP by record margins. While Sunil Kumar Sharma won the election in Sahibabad by a margin of 2,14,835 votes trouncing SP's Amarpal Sharma, Pankaj Singh defeated his nearest rival Sunil Chaudhury of SP by a margin of 1,81000 votes securing 70.83 per cent votes.
List of MLAs who lost by less than 500 votes