New Delhi: With BJP ahead in more or less 14 seats for the post of mayor in UP Civic Polls 2017, the picture has become clear that the saffron party is all set to sweep local body polls.

Many were seeing the municipal elections as the test for chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and it seemly that he has qualified the "test" with first division.

The BJP has won the Amethi seat. However, party has lost all the six seats in Kaushambi which is considered the stronghold of Deputy CM of UP KP Maurya.

In the remaining two places, the BSP was leading, according to trends from these seats in the first four hours of counting of votes for all the 652 urban local bodies that began at 8 am.

Interestingly, after 17 years, the BSP has contested the local body polls on the party symbol.
 As per trends, the BJP candidates were leading in seats including Lucknow, Allahabad, Aligarh,
Varanasi, Ghaziabad, Gorakhpur, Faizabad and Moradabad municipal corporations while the BSP was ahead in Jhansi and Agra municipal corporations.

The civic polls are being seen as a referendum of Yogi Adityanath government's performance in the past seven months.



The BJP had won 10 out of 12 mayoral seats in 2012.

Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma when asked to comment on trends said the people of the state have shown full faith in the BJP and its ideology and discarded the SP, the BSP and the Congress.

"The SP, the BSP and the Congress contested the polls as each other's relatives. (SP chief) Akhilesh Yadav and  (Congress vice president) Rahul Gandhi, who were together during assembly polls as 'UP ke ladke' have become like the tyre and tube of a cycle and it has got punctured," Sharma said.



Commenting on BJP's superb performance in the UP Civic Polls 2017, party spokesperson Sidharth Nath Singh said that it is a good signal for the 2019 General Elections.

"BJP wave which started in 2014, is till intact," he added.



The complete results are likely to be declared by 7:00 pm in the evening.

The election campaign generated a lot of political heat. Chief Minister of UP Yogi Adityanath criss-crossed the state to woo voters in the name of development, while opposition SP, BSP and Congress campaigns were comparatively low key.

The UP urban local body election, involved over 3.3 crore voters in the 75 districts of the state.

This win will definitely going to give boost to BJP. But it may or may not influence the upcoming Gujarat Assembly Polls.