By-elections do not always convey any significant message, but results of by-elections for one Lok Sabha and two assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh seem to have put a question mark over BJP's invincibility away from Gujarat.
In the Mainpuri Lok Sabha constituency represented earlier by Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, the BJP has been defeated by his daughter-in-law Dimple Yadav by a record margin of nearly three lakh votes.
The ruling party in the state has also lost the Khatauli state assembly seat held by it by a huge margin.
And though the party has managed to wrest the Rampur assembly seat, where elections were held following the conviction and subsequent disqualification of SP strongman Azam Khan, the election process has come under a cloud amidst opposition protests that have reverberated in the Supreme Court.
In Mainpuri, the BJP fielded a former SP leader and an aide of Mulayam's younger brother Shivpal Yadav against Dimple Yadav, wife of former UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and now SP national president, in the hope of exploiting the family feud.
In a contest that was billed as a battle for Mulayam's legacy, Dimple seized control of the family bastion that had sent a family member to the Lok Sabha six times in succession by defeating her BJP rival by 2,88,461 votes.
This margin of victory is even greater than that registered in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav himself contested from the seat.
The BJP might claim that its victory in the state's Muslim-dominated Rampur Sadar seat -- a stronghold of Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan and his family -- is an achievement.
But SP leaders have alleged that party supporters were prevented by state administration from voting and the issue has also been raised in the Supreme Court. Interestingly, the constituency recorded a dismal voter turnout, with less than 40 per cent of eligible voters turning up at the polling stations.
For the BJP, the upset in the Khatauli constituency in western UP should be a matter of concern. The by-election was held following disqualification after the conviction of MLA Vikram Singh Saini in a 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots case.
The BJP had fielded his wife Rajkumari Saini to retain the seat and launched a polarising campaign, with UP CM Yogi Adityanath and Deputy CM Keshav Prasad as top campaigners. But she was defeated by Madan Bhayya of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), an ally of SP, by a huge margin of over 22,000 votes.
RLD president Jayant Chaudhary had stayed put in Khatauli to garner support for his party's nominee.
Interestingly, Khatauli in Western UP has a substantial presence of the Jat community that had voted for the BJP in the 2017 assembly elections.
A significant feature of the by-elections was that both the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party -- two other major players in state politics -- did not contest, leaving the field open for a direct contest between the ruling BJP and the SP-RLD alliance.
The by-election results show that the BJP can be defeated when its opposition is not divided.
(Yogesh Vajpeyi is a freelance journalist and media consultant. These are the writer's views.)