After the stunning victory of Samajwadi Party in the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency, the battle for the by-election to Milkipur is hotting up.
SP MP Awadesh Prasad was MLA from Milkipur assembly constituency in Faizabad district.
The stakes are high for the Bharatiya Janata Party as it lost the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat which includes Ayodhya, where the Ram temple was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 22 this year. The BJP hopes to regain some lost ground if it wins the Milkipur assembly seat.
Katheri assembly seat in neighbouring Ambedkar Nagar district has also high stakes as SP MLA Lalji Verma has also been elected to the Lok Sabha.
The opposition INDIA bloc faces the challenging task of proving that it retains the tempo generated by the victory in the Lok Sabha polls. The upcoming bypolls to 10 Uttar Pradesh assembly seats may answer the question.
SP and Congress, both constituents of INDIA bloc, have announced their alliance not only for the bypolls but also for the 2027 UP assembly elections. The bypolls will also be a test of whether the slump in BJP’s Lok Sabha seat tally in the state will have any bearing on the assembly seats.
The Election Commission of India is yet to announce the schedule for the bypolls but political parties in UP have started the preparations. The 10 assembly seats where bypolls will be held are the ones vacated by MLAs who contested and won the Lok Sabha elections.
“Our preparations are on. Talks over seat-sharing are in progress. Top-level leaders of both the parties (Congress and SP) are in touch. We will continue to fight in alliance with the SP under the INDIA bloc. We will win the bypolls on all the seats the way we defeated the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections on a majority of seats,” said SP spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary.
On the other hand, the BJP, having suffered a big setback in the Lok Sabha elections, is gearing up for a massive ground campaign to boost the morale of its cadre and reach out to the voters.
“We will fight the bypolls with full spirit and will retain almost all the seats,” said BJP spokesperson Manish Dixit.
Among the seats that will head to bypolls is SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s Karhal assembly seat, Khair (Aligarh), Kundarki (Moradabad), Katehari (Ambedkar Nagar), Phulpur (Prayagraj), Ghaziabad, Majhawan (Mirzapur), Meerapur (Muzaffarnagar) and Milkipur (Ayodhya).
In political circles it is believed that the INDIA bloc may pose a formidable challenge to the ruling BJP and boosting the morale of the party cadre after its performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls would be a challenging task for the BJP.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance experienced a significant setback, with a decline in both seat tally and vote share. The BJP’s vote share decreased from 49.98 per cent in 2019 to 41.37 per cent in 2024. The Apna Dal (Sonelal) saw its vote share shrink from 1.21 per cent in 2019 to 0.92 per cent in 2024 and it won only one seat.
The Bahujan Samaj Party, which contested the parliamentary elections solo, also faced a substantial decline in its vote share which dropped from 19.43 per cent in 2019 to 9.39 per cent with zero seats in 2024.
In a notable shift, the SP, which had not won any reserved seats in 2019, secured seven reserved seats, while its ally Congress won one reserved seat. In 2019, all reserved seats were won by the BJP, BSP and Apna Dal (S).
