A day after the civic poll results were announced and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed yet another 'saffron tsunami' in its favour, questions were being asked on Saturday whether all this muscle flexing, chest thumping and drum beating was justified? The party should, at least, hold the laddoos for a while!
While there was no doubt that the BJP had fared very well in the 16 municipal corporations and had succeeded in getting 14 of its mayoral candidates elected, a closer look at the Nagar Palika Parishad and Nagar Panchayat polls paints a picture that is not too comfortable for the ruling dispensation.
While in most places, the BJP may have won, the margins, as compared with the February-March 2017 state Assembly polls, have dwindled. Crucially, the BJP is not the number one seat winner—the independents were. But what is noticeable is the fact that both the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) seem to have done impressively at the hustings.
This was in stark contrast to the drubbing they got at the hands of the BJP in the state Assembly polls just eight months back. Of the total 1,300 councillor, for which elections were held in the three-phased urban body polls in November, the BJP managed to win 596, while the SP, which is not an urban voter–based party, managed to get 202 seats and the BSP got 147 seats in its first outing in the civic polls.
The Congress, which the BJP leaders seldom chose to spare, also got 110 seats. Of the 198 chairmen of the Nagar Palika Parishads, the BJP won 69 (or 34%), while 45 have been won by the SP, 29 by the BSP and nine by the Congress.
In the polls for the 5,261 seats for the members of the Nagar Palika Parishad, the BJP won 917 seats (or only 17.5%), followed by the SP (476), BSP (260) and Congress (154). Of the 438 seats of Nagar Panchayat heads, the BJP won 100 (or 22.8%), while the SP got 83 seats, BSP won 45 and 17 were won by the Congress. This is a victory of sorts for the BJP, but not something to tom-tom about.
The independents have fared very well, but this was largely ignored by the regional and national media. Forty-three Nagar Palika chairmen, 182 Nagar Panchayat heads, and 222 councillors were independents and so were 7,229 ward members.
Even the first-time entrant to the civic polls, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), made inroads into the polity. AAP won 19 Nagar Panchayat member seats, two Nagar Panchayat chairmen seats and 15 Nagar Palika Parishad memberships. According to the state election commission, the AAP managed to win three councillor seats in the urban body polls as well.
The Nagar Panchayat heads of AAP were elected in Tendwari (Banda) and Sahaspur (Bijnore). In the Nagar Palika Parishad polls, AAP won two seats in Jhansi and one in Moradabad. AAP's Vibhu Tripathi won as a councillor in Ward 6 in Lalganj. Haseen Jehan became the councillor from Ward 51 in Moradabad.
Vaibhav Maheshwari, state spokesman of the AAP, told mediapersons that the "humble beginning with so little resources and cadre is more than heartening." He added that the BJP should definitely be worried about its prospects in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as the urban body polls have not been 'exactly in their favor' as they were claiming.
What could also worry the BJP was the fact that these results have come after a 50-rally campaign by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath; on the other side, no one equal to his stature, like Mayawati or Akhilesh Yadav, campaigned. The victory was rendered bitter by serious allegations of bungling in voter lists and manipulation of EVMs. At many places—like Meerut, Kanpur and Lucknow—there were reports of where a candidate who voted for himself, ended up with zero votes, raising questions about the fairness of the poll process.
Mayawati on Saturday made similar accusations and demanded that the 2019 general elections take place on the basis of the traditional ballot papers. She went on to say that if this happened, the BJP would never return to power ever. Political observers also felt that at many places, the BJP scraped through by default, as there was no opposition candidate worth his/her salt.
Another point that the BJP needed to take note of was the fact that it had lost in Ward number 68 in Gorakhpur, the ward where the Gorakhnath Peeth, is located. Adityanath is the priest of the Gorakhnath Temple and was said to have considerable clout there. Nadira Khatoon, an independent candidate, defeated BJP's Maya Tripathi by 483 votes.
Overall, in Gorakhpur, BJP won 27 wards, SP 18 and the BSP and Congress won two each. Independents won in 18 seats.
The BJP's embarrassment did not end here. The party candidate Prashant Kesari also lost in the Panchayat of Sirathu, the home town of deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya.
It's not a clean sweep for the BJP, as the party spokespersons may have liked others to think. What came as a relief for the BJP was that the opposition was in disarray. If the divided opposition parties could get their act together, the BJP leaders would be forced to spend sleepless nights ahead of the next polls.
-IANS
