The election of district panchayat president in Uttar Pradesh, which was defeated by the BJP, is a warning bell for both the Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP). The Congress lost its bastion of Rae Bareli, from where Sonia Gandhi is the sitting MP, while the SP lost in strongholds like Mainpuri, from where Mulayam Singh Yadav is an MP.
In Mainpuri, the SP had not lost this post for the last three decades. BJP also won the post of District Panchayat President for the first time in history in both Amethi and Rae Bareli. The former was won by the SP in the 2016 elections while Rae Bareli was won by the Congress then. However, Congress candidate from Rae Bareli, Aarti Singh lost this time to BJP’s Ranjana Chaudhary. The Samajwadi Party did not field its candidate in Rae Bareli.
Congress did not contest in Amethi but SP candidate lost to BJP’s Rajesh Agrahir by a huge margin. The defeat of Rae Bareli would particularly hurt the Congress as its former leaders worked to defeat the party from Rae Bareli. Former Congress MLC Dinesh Singh, who contested from BJP against Sonia Gandhi in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, led the effort. His brother Awadhesh Singh had won for the Congress in 2016 as the district panchayat president.
Alarm bells will ring for the SP too as it lost even in its strongholds like Mainpuri, Kannauj and Firozabad. The victory of BJP’s Archana Bhaduria as district panchayat president in Mainpuri, the parliamentary seat of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, was a setback for the party as it had not lost the post for nearly 30 years. The SP also lost district panchayat president posts in three other districts, namely Sambhal, Moradabad and Rampur, where it has sitting MPs.
The SP, however, has blamed the loss on “high-fidelity and illegal tactics” used by the ruling BJP government to defeat them in these elections.
In 2016, when the SP was in power, it won 63 out of 75 seats in these elections, while the BJP and its allies have now turned the fortunes around and won 67 of these. In 2016, BJP and BSP had similarly accused the SP government of arbitrariness and misuse of official power. The BJP then actually lost even from Varanasi, the prime minister’s constituency.
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