Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday took a dig at the Congress for its poor performance in the ongoing Legislative Council (MLC) elections across four states.
"MLC elections in 28 seats across 4 big states - Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka. Elections held using ballot papers. Guess how many seats Congress won?" he wrote in an X post.
This is also a dig at the Congress' long-standing claim of the BJP's alleged vote theft being the reason why it calls for a return to ballot papers—which also came to the fore of the protests against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar.
Karnataka
The national party faced its biggest defeat in Karnataka, where it is in power, while regional equations and other factors added to its defeats in the other three states.
It lost all four seats in Karnataka to the NDA alliance of the Opposition JD(S), which snatched victory in the Bengaluru Teachers' seat, and the BJP, which registered victory in the North-East Teachers', South-East Graduates' and West Graduates' seats.
Bihar
Though Bihar did not see the NDA alliance sweep as much as it did in Karnataka, due to regional competitors taking up equal weight, it did see the Congress snuffed out.
Here, the BJP won the Tirhut Teachers', Darbhanga Graduates', and Kosi Graduates' seats, making up the larger part of the NDA's wins, that included the JD(U)'s win over the highly contested Patna Graduates' constituency.
While the Tirhut Graduates' and Saran Teachers' seats were bagged by independents, the Bihar MLC polls also marked a major moment for the Prashant Kishor-led Jan Suraaj Party (JSP), which wrested the Darbhanga Teachers' seat from the sitting Congress MLC.
Maharashtra
Apart from the high-stakes battle for the Nagpur Division Graduates’ seat between the Congress and the BJP candidates, which saw the saffron party eventually take win after a close contest, the ruling BJP-Sena alliance was dominating two other seats as well.
The NCP(SP) had a hold on the remaining two seats as well, at the time of writing this article.
Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh's MLC elections battle continues as a fight to the finish between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party, where the Congress has again been snuffed out.
The BJP has so far won five seats in key institutional strongholds, while the SP has won three, including the Varanasi Teachers' seat, and looks to retain its leads in the remaining three seats as well, where counting was progressing, at the time of writing this article.
