As the BJP swept the biennial polls to the Uttar Pradesh legislative council, the Samajwadi Party — the main opposition in the state — drew a blank. The BJP won 24 of the 27 the local authority seats, where polling was held last week. In addition, the BJP had won nine of the 36 seats unopposed.
In Deoria-Kushinagar MLC seat, SP candidate Dr Kafeel Khan lost to BJP’s Dr Ratan Pal Singh by a margin of 3,251 votes. While Ratan Pal garnered 4,255 votes, Khan could bag only 1,031 votes from the crucial seat.
Khan was arrested in January 2020 after a speech he had delivered at the Aligarh Muslim University on December 10, 2019 during the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protests. He was subsequently booked under the stringent National Security Act (NSA).
On September 1, 2020, the Allahabad High Court had quashed Khan’s detention under the NSA and ordered his immediate release, saying his speech at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) didn’t promote hatred or violence.
The results take the BJP past the halfway-mark in the 100-member House. Now, it will have 67 members in the upper house of the state legislature. But it suffered a setback in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, where it stood distant third.
Two independents and a candidate from the Jansatta Dal (Loktantrik) emerged victorious in the elections. In Varanasi, BJP’s Sudama Patel stood third with just 170 votes as Independent candidate Annapurna Singh secured a resounding victory with 4,234 votes. Samajwadi Party’s Umesh Yadav got 345 votes, Varanasi District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma said.
