The final race for the 11 heavily contested seats in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council (MLC) elections took place on Wednesday, the second day of counting.
The BJP has so far won six seats, while the Samajwadi Party (SP) has won four, with several poll battles seeing each party turn things around or hold their ground after tight second-preference vote margins, such as in the Gorakhpur-Faizabad Teachers' seat, which saw a dramatic shift.
This seat under UP CM Yogi Adityanath's constituency was in limbo for quite a while due to allegations of broken and missing ballot boxes. This led to major clashes between supporters of the three candidates in the fray—independent candidate Rajiv Yadav, the BJP's Dhruv Narayan Tripathi, and Sanjayan Tripathi from the SP.
Though Yadav had been leading here earlier, the BJP candidate later turned the lead around to win, adding to claims of vote theft amid the controversy over the seat.
Counting is also underway for the Varanasi Graduates' seat—where the SP's Ashutosh Sinha had earlier surpassed 28,000 votes while the BJP's Kedarnath Singh has yet to reach 20,000—which local media reports later said was halted due to tensions over claims of vote theft.
If Sinha wins, it would be a double upset for the BJP in PM Narendra Modi's constituency, after the SP's Lal Bihari won the Teachers' seat here.
The Lucknow Graduates' seat was won by the SP's Kanti Singh against the BJP's Avneesh Kumar Singh after the former crossed more than 17,000 votes, though this is yet to be formally announced.
Akhilesh Yadav's SP also won the Allahabad-Jhansi Graduates' poll race with Man Singh Yadav dominating over the BJP's Ashok Kumar Rathore, and the Agra Teachers' seat won by Akash Agarwal over the BJP's Harikishore Tiwari.
Agarwal's closely contested win here comes years after he did so in 2020, as an independent candidate back then.
As for the other Agra seat, the BJP's Manvendra Pratap Singh managed a victory over the SP's Shashank Yadav, while its candidate for the Bareilly-Moradabad Teachers' seat, Dr. Hari Singh Dhillon, won against SP candidate Haji Danish Akhtar. The BJP's Umesh Dwivedi also won the Lucknow Teachers' seat against the SP's Prateek Kumar.
This comes a day after the saffron party made a strong start to the MLC vote counting with a double win over the Samajwadi Party in both Meerut seats. Shrichand Agarwal beat Nitin Kumar Tomar for the Teachers' seat, while Dinesh Goyal defeated Pramod Bhati for the Graduates' seat.
After seven others withdrew from the competition by Friday, as many as 152 candidates are in the fray for the 11 Uttar Pradesh MLC seats, for which the counting of votes began on Tuesday morning at 8 AM and continued well into Wednesday, amid clashes over a number of seats.
