UP Municipal Election Results: Litmus Test For Adityanath, SP Looks To Get A Boost Ahead Of LS Polls

UP Municipal Election Results: The results hold importance for BJP, Congress and Samajwadi Party as it will be a platform to showcase their strength before the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha election.

UP Nikay Chunav: Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and UP CM Yogi Adityanath ( Image Source :PTI )

It will be stern test for the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government with votes cast during the two phases of the urban local body polls set to be counted on Saturday. The results hold importance for BJP, Congress and Samajwadi Party as it will be a platform to showcase their strength before the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha election. UP sends the maximum 80 MPs to Lok Sabha.

The State Election Commission (SEC) said 353 counting centres have been set up. According to the SEC, 83,378 candidates were in the fray for 14,522 posts. 

The two phase polling saw about 53 per cent voters exercising their franchise.

In the 2017 polls, Yogi Adityanath in his first year as Chief Minister, guided BJP to a thumping win in mayoral elections by bagging 14 of 16 municipal corporations. BSP won two seats, Meerut and Aligarh, while Samajwadi Party and Congress could not open their accounts.

READ | 4.32 Crore Voters, 14,684 Posts, 83,507 Candidates: The Sheer Scale Of UP Nagar Nikay Chunav

UP Nagar Nikay Chunav 2023 Results On May 13: All You Need To Know

• Polls were held to elect 17 mayors and 1,401 corporators. As many as 19 corporators have been elected unopposed.
• This time, nine of the 17 mayoral posts have been reserved -- one for Scheduled Caste category (Jhansi), one for Scheduled Caste woman (Agra), two for OBC woman (Shahjahanpur and Firozabad), two for OBC category (Saharanpur and Meerut), and three for women (Lucknow, Kanpur and Ghaziabad).
• Shahjahanpur will get its mayor for the first time this year as the city became a municipal corporation in 2018.
• The poll results will also decide the fate of 198 chairpersons of municipal councils,5,260 municipal council members (nagar palika parishads), 542 chairpersons of town panchayats and 7,177 members of town panchayats.
• UP BJP spokesperson Hero Bajpai said the party will win all 17 mayor seats. "It will bag a lion's share in the corporators' category. The party will also perform extremely well in nagar palika parishads and nagar panchayats," PTI quoted Bajpai as saying.
• SP spokesperson Deepak Ranjan said the ULB polls "will spring up a surprise". "The cycle (SP's election symbol) has covered a significant distance during the election, while the lotus (BJP's symbol did not bloom," Ranjan said.
• On the ground, BJP and Samajwadi Party campaigned aggressively while there was little presence of Congress, with most of its top leaders busy in Karnataka polls.
• Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath led the BJP's campaign, holding nearly 20 public meetings in a week. Adityanath promised "cleaning of garbage" along with the "cleaning of mafia and criminals", days after gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmed was killed in Prayagraj.
• While BJP has not released any manifesto, it has reached out to voters with a "nagar vikas sankalp patra" in which the party has highlighted the ongoing works in infrastructure development and has claimed the state was becoming "apradh-apradhi mukt" (free from crime and criminals).
• SP chief Akhilesh Yadav attacked the BJP regime on cleanliness as well as law and order in the state. Yadav alleged BJP was indulging in the politics of "spreading hate, Hindu-Muslim (divide) and conflicts in society". He also claimed the BJP and the BSP have forged an "internal understanding" for the upcoming polls.