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In UP council polls, BJP heads to clean sweep, setback for Akhilesh Yadav party
UP MLC polls: The BJP has already won nine of the 36 seats with its candidates having been declared unopposed before the voting to the remaining 27 seats was held on Saturday
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh is headed to a clean sweep in the biennial MLC polls (for the local bodies) as the counting of votes for the 27 seats - the voting for which was held on Saturday - is underway.
Though chief electoral officer, Ajay Kumar Shukla, said that the authorised election results would be announced by evening, the initial trends - available from districts - showed the BJP was leading on a majority of 27 seats while independents may also win 2-3 seats. The Samajwadi Party (SP), the principal opposition party, may not open its account.
The BJP has already won nine of the 36 seats with its candidates having been declared elected unopposed earlier. The voting to the remaining 27 seats was held on Saturday with over 98 per cent voter turnout.
The 98.11 per cent of 1,20,657 voters, who exercised their franchise in these polls included village pradhans, members and chairpersons of the kshetra and zila panchayats, corporators/nagar palika members. There were 95 candidates in the fray.
With this the BJP appears all set to get majority in the 100-member upper house (Vidhan Parishad) too after it got a thumping majority in the lower house following in the assembly polls last month.
In the 100-member upper house, currently the BJP has 34 MLCs, the Samajwadi Party has 17 and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party has four MLCs.
The Congress, the Apna Dal (Sonelal) and the NISHAD (Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal) party have one member each in the house. The Teachers' group has two MLCs, while the Independent group ('Nirdal Samooh') and Independents have one MLC each.
The BJP tally in the parishad may now double, making it the single largest party in the upper house after a very long time.
Twenty-seven seats for which voting was held on Saturday are Moradabad-Bijnor, Rampur-Bareilly, Pilibhit-Shahjahanpur, Sitapur, Lucknow-Unnao, Raebareli, Pratapgarh, Sultanpur, Barabanki, Bahraich, Gonda, Faizabad, Bast-Siddhartnagar, Gorakhpur-Maharajganj, Deoria, Azamgarh-Mau, Balia, Ghazipur, Janupur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Jhansi-Jalaun-Lalitpur, Kanpur-Fatehpur, Etawah-Farrukhabad, Agra-Firozabad, Meerut-Ghaziabad and Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur.
The constituencies where candidates have been elected unopposed are Badaun, Hardoi, Kheri, Mirzapur-Sonbhadra, Banda-Hamirpur, Aligarh, Bulandshahr, Mathura-Etah-Mainpuri. Two candidates were elected unopposed from Mathura-Etah-Mainpuri constituency while one each was elected from seven others.
