With the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party springing a surprise in Rampur by wresting the assembly seat from Samajwadi Party, the SP retained the prestigious Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh in the by-polls the results of which were announced on Thursday.
The BJP, however, suffered a setback when it lost its Khatauli assembly seat to Rashtriya Lok Dal.
Incidentally, just nine months back the SP had won the Rampur and BJP the Khatauli assembly seats, but the voters rejected them in the bypolls.
All eyes were on the Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat, considered a bastion of SP from where Mulayam Singh Yadav had won a record five times. Twice his family members had won elections from Mainpuri. The election in Mainpuri was necessitated following the death of Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Riding on the sympathy wave, SP candidate Dimple Yadav, wife of party president Akhilesh Yadav, defeated BJP's Raghuraj Singh Shakya by a record margin of 2,88,461 votes. The SP polled 64 per cent votes.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Mulayam Singh Yadav had won the Mainpuri seat by around 94,000 votes by receiving 53.75 per cent votes.
“The increase in the vote percentage in favour of SP by over 10 per cent is a clear indication that there was a sympathy wave in favour of SP in Mainpuri,” said Nomita P Kumar of the Giri Institute of Social Studies.
Earlier, Dimple was MP from Kannauj in 2014 but she lost to BJP in 2019.
SP national secretary and former cabinet minister Rajendra Chaudhary congratulated Dimple Yadav for the victory and said that this victory had set the ball rolling for the 2024 parliamentary elections.
In the Rampur assembly bypoll, the BJP wrested the seat from the SP with the ruling party’s Akash Saxena winning by 34,136 votes. He defeated SP candidate Asim Raza. While BJP polled 62 per cent votes, SP candidate received just 36 per cent votes.
By-elections in Rampur were held following the disqualification of SP leader Mohammad Azam Khan who had won the seat for a record seventh time in 2022. Azam Khan had won the Rampur Sadar assembly seat in the March 2022 poll by polling 59.71 per cent votes but he was disqualified after his conviction in a hate speech case.
On the other hand, Madan Bhaiya, the candidate of RLD, an alliance partner of SP, won the Khatauli assembly seat by 22,143 votes against BJP candidate Rajkumari Saini. The RLD candidate polled 54 per cent votes and 41.72 per cent votes bagged by the BJP candidate.
By-poll in Khatauli was necessitated after sitting BJP member Vikram Saini was disqualified following his conviction in a criminal case. His wife Rajkumari Saini was the BJP candidate. Vikram had won the seat in 2017 and 2022 on BJP ticket.
With this bypoll result, RLD' s strength in UP assembly has gone up to nine while SP has lost one seat and its number has now come down to 109. Ruling BJP' s strength remains 254.