The Bharatiya Janata Party has seen a significant rise in its vote-share in all mayoral seats this year, thanks to the popularity of Yogi Adityanath and the development efforts of his government.
A comparative study of the figures between the 2017 and 2023 municipal body elections reveals that the BJP received more votes and the party’s vote percentage rose on every seat in 2023.
The BJP gained control of the newly-created Shahjahanpur mayoral seat, and in Meerut and Aligarh, where it had earlier been defeated, the party won the mayoral polls this time. Furthermore, the BJP received a significant number of votes in this area.
When the Yogi Adityanath government took over for the first time in the state in 2017, the BJP bagged 14 of the 16 mayoral seats while Meerut and Aligarh seats went to the Bahujan Samaj Party. But in 2023, BJP won all the 17 mayoral seats with the addition of Shahjahanpur Municipal Corporation.
In Ayodhya, the BJP received 44,642 votes in 2017 and 77,494 votes in 2023. In Agra, the BJP polled 2,17,881 votes in 2017 and 2,67,925 votes in 2023. In Kanpur Nagar the BJP received 4,40,352 votes in 2023 against 3,96,725 votes in 2017. The number of votes in Ghaziabad increased from 2,82,793 in 2017 to 3,50,905 in 2023.
In 2023, the BJP gave its tickets to the outgoing mayors on three seats –Pramila Pandey from Kanpur Nagar, Umesh Gautam from Bareilly and Vinod Agarwal from Moradabad. The BJP received more votes this time compared to last year, according to a comparative analysis of these three seats. The percentage of total votes polled here also increased.
In Kanpur Nagar, Pramila Pandey received 3,96,725 votes (42.1 per cent) in 2017 and in 2023, she received 4,40,353 votes. Umesh Gautam received 1,39,127 votes (40.73 per cent) in Bareilly in 2017 and 1,67,385 votes (47.54 per cent) in 2023. Vinod Agarwal received 94,677 votes in Moradabad in 2017 and he polled more than 1.21 lakh votes in 2023.
The BJP’s success in the municipal elections is seen as a reflection of the people’s trust in the Yogi Adityanath government and its development initiatives.
