NOIDA: BJP, which reposed faith in its sitting MLAs, retained all eight constituencies in Gautam Budh Nagar and Ghaziabad. The winning margins, however, were varied. While the BJP candidate from Sahibabad won by 2.14 lakh votes, the nominee from Loni had a narrow margin of just over 8,000 votes. On the whole, most of BJP’s candidates in the two districts bettered their 2017 performance.
The SP-RLD alliance, which gave BJP a tough fight in a few seats, managed to garner the most number of votes after the winning party. BSP’s performance was on the decline, even in Dadri and Muradnagar that were once considered its strongholds. Congress continued with its poor show, with the Noida candidate, Pankhuri Pathak, securing just about 14,000 votes. Unlike in Punjab, AAP, the new entrant in UP, failed to leave an impression.
In Gautam Budh Nagar, sitting BJP MLAs Pankaj Singh from Noida, Tejpal Nagar of Dadri and Jewar’s Dhirendra Singh registered victories. The winners from Ghaziabad district were Atul Garg (Ghaziabad), Sunil Sharma (Sahibabad), Nard Kishore Gurjar (Loni), Ajit Pal Tyagi (Muradnagar) and Manju Siwach (Modinagar).
Bordering the national capital, Noida is often considered a “VIP” seat because of its demography. The son of Union minister Rajnath Singh, BJP’s Pankaj Singh was faced with a challenge from the SP-RLD alliance candidate, Sunil Chaudhary, and Congress’s Pankhuri Pathak.
Pathak, who contested on the issue of homebuyers, had tried to corner Singh over an “outsider” tag — Singh is a voter from Lucknow — but failed to make much of a difference. Singh bagged 2.4 lakh votes (70.1% of the total votes polled) and won with a margin of 1.8 lakh votes over Chaudhary. The BJP candidate bettered his own performance of 2017, when he had polled 1.6 lakh votes. Pathak got 13,494 votes.
In Dadri, sitting MLA Tejpal Nagar, who had faced opposition from a section of homebuyers over the issue of delayed registries, bagged 2.18 lakh votes (61.6% of the total votes polled) while his nearest rival, SP’s Rajkumar Bhati, polled 79,850 votes. The margin between the two candidates was over 1.4 lakh votes. In the previous election, Nagar had bagged 1.4 lakh votes (53.6%) and defeated BSP’s Satveer Singh Gurjar, who had secured 61,049 votes.
In Jewar, Avtar Singh Bhadana, the candidate fielded by the SP-RLD alliance, and BSP’s Narendra Bhati tried to cash in on the controversy surrounding 9th century ruler Mihir Bhoj, but several big-ticket projects like the Noida international airport, Film City and the medical device park played a major role in securing BJP MLA Dhirendra Singh’s win for the second time.
Singh won the Jewar seat by 56,315 votes. He secured 1.17 lakh votes (50.5%), while Bhadana managed 60,890. Singh, who had got 1.02 lakh votes in 2017, had defeated BSP’s Vedram Bhati by a margin of 22,173 votes. In the Sahibabad seat in Ghaziabad district, BJP MLA Sharma once again registered a “historic” victory, defeating Amarpal Sharma of the SP-RLD alliance by more than 2.14 lakh votes, the highest margin in the two districts. Sahibabad is the largest assembly constituency in terms of voters.
While Sharma bagged 3.2 lakh votes (67.03%), the alliance candidate managed to secure 1.08 lakh votes. In the 2017 elections, Sharma had got 2.6 lakh votes. The incumbent MLA from the Ghaziabad seat, Atul Garg, bettered his 2017 performance. He secured 1.5 lakh votes (61.4%), up from 1.2 lakh in the previous election. Garg defeated SP’s Vishal Sharma by a margin of over 1 lakh votes. Loni, considered to be a “laboratory” of Hindutva ideology, saw a close contest between sitting MLA Nand Kishore Gurjar and SP-RLD’s Madan Bhaiya. While Gurjar secured around 1.27 lakh votes (40.4%), Bhaiya stood close behind with 1.18 lakh votes (37.7%).
Ahead of the polls, Nand Kishore had courted controversy by raising a slogan, “Loni mein na Ali, na Bahubali. Loni mein sirf Bajrangbali”. It had prompted the Election Commission to issue him a notice. But that failed to deter the BJP candidate, who kept raising the slogan at various platforms. Bhaiya, a strongman with a “Robin Hood” image, had pushed the party’s poll plank of brotherhood (“bhaichara”) and development and managed to garner support to a large extent.
In Muradnagar, Ajit Pal Tyagi defeated SP-RLD candidate Surinder Kumar Munni by 97,000 votes. Manju Siwach of Modinagar, the only woman BJP candidate from the two districts, defeated SP-RLD’s Sudesh Sharma by a margin of over 34,000 votes.
The decision of the SP and RLD to forge an alliance had boosted the morale of supporters from both parties, who came in large numbers during the brief visits by Akhilesh Yadav and Jayant Singh. The two leaders, who kept a red bundle of grains in their hands, had taken the “anna sankalp” (food pledge) to defeat the BJP and raised slogans of “bhaichara zindabad”. For the BJP, chief minister Yogi Adityanath led from the front, and held public rallies in almost every constituency of the two districts. In his speeches, he alleged “goondaraj” and “anarchy” during the SP rule.
