Independents - not BJP - won Uttar Pradesh civic polls
The vote share of independent candidates has shot up from a paltry 2.5 per cent in the March 2017 Assembly election to 20.4 per cent.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) might have "swept" the civic polls in Uttar Pradesh, but a detailed account of the results shows something unique - independents grabbed a sizeable number of seats all across the state.
Except for the major urban seats, where BJP ruled the roost, the independents managed to score well above both the ruling and Opposition parties on many counts. And undeniably, this trend has never been witnessed in the country's most populous state.
The vote share of independent candidates has shot up from a paltry 2.5 per cent in the March 2017 Assembly election to 20.4 per cent in the civic polls, making it obvious that more than the track-record of political parties, it was the reputation of individuals that carried meaning for the voter at the grass-roots level.
Even more significant is the fact that despite BJP taking the cake on 14 of the 16 mayoral seats, its overall vote share has actually come down in comparison to what the party recorded in the last Assembly election in March, 2017, when it propelled to power with a record 324 seats in a 403 member UP house.
Deeper analysis of the civic poll outcome has revealed that the ruling BJP's vote share that had shot up to 39.7 per cent in March, has now dropped to 30.8 per cent - a sharp fall of 9 per cent over a span of eight months. And if the vote share of the three Opposition parties were to be combined with that of the independents, the grand total goes to a whopping 66.5 per cent.
Interestingly, however, the position of the key Opposition parties - Samajwadi Party as well as Bahujan Samaj Party - has also taken a beating, albeit a smaller one. If Samajwadi Party's vote share in March stood at 21.8 per cent, it has reduced to 18 per cent now. Likewise, BSP too recorded 18 per cent vote in the civic poll, in contrast to 22.2 per cent in the Assembly election. On the contrary, Congress whose performance was pathetic on both occasions, has recorded an increase in the vote share from 6.2 per cent to 10 per cent now.
Training their guns on the ruling BJP, the entire Opposition has been raising its voice against use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) , which, according to them, have been hacked to allegedly benefit the ruling BJP. Former chief ministers - BSP chief Mayawati as well as Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav - claimed that the BJP scores have been high only in places where EVMs were used. In places where the state election commission had used the conventional ballot paper, BJP's vote share has gone considerably down, they claimed.
Evidently, it was BJP's sweep on 14 of the 16 mayoral seats that built the hype for the ruling party. No one cared to go into the details of other seats at the lower levels, where BJP's performance was not really consequential. As a matter of fact, BJP fared rather poorly in some of the semi-urban areas, where it had to remain content with barely 100 seats of Nagar Panchayat chairman, while independents gave everyone a beating by grabbing as many as 182 seats. Samajwadi Party managed to get very close to BJP by winning 83 of these seats in comparison to BSP's 45, Congress' 17 and Aam Aadmi Party's two seats.
BJP, however, managed to grab 70 seats of Nagar Palika chairmen, followed by 43 independents, SP 43, BSP 29 and Congress 9.
Among municipal corporators in the big cities, while BJP did lead with 596 seats, independents stood second with 224, followed by SP at 202, BSP at 147, Congress at 100 and AAP at 3 seats.
The independents once again stole the show in the last category of "ward members", with a fantastic score of 7,229 seats. BJP stood in sharp contrast at 1,586, followed by 903 of SP, 477 of BSP, 271 of Congress and 36 of AAP.
That makes it pretty evident that the picture is not all that rosy for the ruling BJP as it seemed on day one as BJP went to town with its fabulous sweep of mayoral positions in the state. Therefore, it may not be all that simple for chief minister Yogi Adityanath to even maintain the 2014 Lok Sabha tally of 73 (including 2 allies), not to talk of his much touted proclamation, "We will win all of UP's 80 Lok Sabha seats in 2019."