UP MLC polls: BJP sweeps four out of five seats; independent candidate gains one
LUCKNOW: The ruling BJP has swept the UP MLC biennial elections by winning four out of five seats in the fray. One seat was won by an independent candidate.
The main opposition Samajwadi Party failed to secure a single seat in this election. Of the five seats, voting for which had taken place on January 30, three belonged to the graduate constituency and two to the teachers' constituency.
Graduate constituency seats:
- Gorakhpur-Faizabad division
- Unnao-Kanpur division
- Bareilly-Moradabad division
Teachers’ constituency seats:
- Kanpur division
- Jhansi-Allahabad division.
The term of all these five seats of the UP legislative council will end on February 12.
BJP's Jaipal Singh (Bareilly-Moradabad division), Arun Pathak (Unnao-Kanpur division), and Devendra Pathak (Gorakhpur-Faizabad division) swept all three graduate constituency seats.
Jaipal Singh made a hat-trick on the graduate seat Bareilly-Moradabad division registering a victory for the third consecutive term.
Singh defeated his nearest rival SP’s Shiv Pratap Singh by a margin of 51257 votes. He got 66,179 votes while the SP candidate secured 14,922.
Similarly, on the Gorakhpur-Faizabad division graduate seat, BJP’s Devendra Pratap Singh registered his fourth consecutive win by defeating his nearest rival Karuna Kant Maurya of SP by a margin of 17,455 votes.
On the third graduate seat of the Unnao-Kanpur division, BJP candidate Arun Pathak registered an emphatic win by defeating his nearest rival Kamlesh Yadav of SP by a margin of 53,125 votes.
The ruling party's Babulal Tiwari won the election from the Jhansi-Allahabad division's teachers' seat but the party lost the Kanpur division teacher's seat to independent candidate Raj Bahadur Chandel.
BJP’s Babulal Tiwari walked away with teachers’ seat of the Jhansi-Allahabad division by a slender margin of 1403 votes defeating his nearest rival Suresh Kumar Tripathi, an independent candidate.
On the other, the independent candidate Raj Bahadur Singh Chandel won the Kanpur Division’s teachers’ constituency sixth time by a margin of 1548 votes defeating another independent candidate Hemraj, BJP’s Venu Ranjan Bhadauria was pushed to third position.
The counting of votes commenced on Thursday and concluded in the wee hours of Friday. The counting of votes took place in Jhansi, Gorakhpur, Bareilly and Kanpur. For the three graduate constituencies, the voting was held at 836 booths and for the two teachers' seats, 238 booths were set up for voting.
While a maximum of 75.86 per cent votes were cast for the teachers’ seat in the Jhansi-Allahabad division, a minimum of 40.23 per cent of voters had turned up to exercise their right for the candidates contesting for teachers’ constituency in the Kanpur division. All 63 candidates were in the fray.