The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) resounding victory in Uttar Pradesh’s urban local body (ULB) polls, winning all 17 mayoral seats and the highest number of councillors’ seats in Municipal Corporations, and members’ seats across Nagar Panchayats and Nagar Palika Parishads proved that the party is ticking all the boxes necessary to emerge victorious in Uttar Pradesh, and staying significantly ahead of other parties in election management.
These polls, the last pan-State elections before the 2024 General Elections, provided tough lessons to the main opposition, the Samajwadi Party (SP), which performed miserably despite party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s campaigning. The verdict has elevated the stature of U.P. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who addressed 50 rallies to reaffirm that he’s the top vote catcher in the State after Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Apart from winning all the 17 Municipal Corporations, the saffron party emerged victorious in over 800 out of the 1,420 seats in the councillors category; 89 out of 199 posts of Nagar Palika Parishad Chairpersons; and around 200 out of the 544 posts of Nagar Panchayat Chairperson. Many Independents registered success in the posts of Nagar Palika Parishad and Nagar Panchayat Chairperson. The SP bagged only 191 posts of councillors in Municipal Corporations, and 35 posts as Nagar Palika Parishad Chairperson. In the previous local body polls held in 2017, the BJP had won 14 out of 16 mayoral seats, while losing Meerut and Aligarh to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
The landslide triumph in U.P., politically the most significant State in India with 80 Lok Sabha seats, comes as a relief for the BJP, which has suffered a decisive defeat in the Karnataka Assembly polls. The verdict established Mr. Adityanath, who led the saffron party’s campaign trail addressing 50 rallies, as a powerful leader within the BJP ecosystem nationally, and signifies that his narrative of “security” based on providing better ‘law and order’ gained support from a large section of urban voters.
“The verdict established Mr. Adityanath as a stronger leader with his plank of law and order, and governance, securing traction with a large section of the electorate. The campaigning by the CM highlighted that the BJP took these polls very seriously going into the 2024 Lok Sabha,” Shashi Kant Pandey, a political scientist teaching at the Lucknow Central University said.
The BJP called the verdict a “trailer” for the 2024 Lok Sabha and its hopes of winning all 80 Lok Sabha seats in the State. “The confidence of U.P. BJP workers have increased tremendously after the local body results. We will try to win all the 80 parliamentary segments in 2024, the way we succeed in mayoral polls by bagging all 17 seats,” Rakesh Tripathi, U.P. BJP spokesperson told The Hindu.
AIMIM’s rise
Apart from the BJP’s landslide victory, the impressive performance by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), led by Hyderabad Lok Sabha member Asaduddin Owaisi in the western U.P. areas having a sizeable Muslim population, is a major takeaway from the polls, and a warning signal to the SP, which gained a major share of minority votes in the 2022 Vidhan Sabha.
The AIMIM’s Mohammad Anas polled more than 1.25 lakh votes for mayoral post at the Meerut Municipal Corporation, bagging the second place after the BJP’s Harikant Ahluwalia, with the SP nominee slipping to the third spot. The AIMIM won five seats of Chairpersons in Nagar Palika Parishads, including in Sambhal, Moradabad and Bareilly. Zeenat Mehndi, won from Kundarki Nagar Panchayat, Imran Khan from Thiria Nizawat Nagar Panchayat in Bareilly, and 75 councillors’ seats were won by the party in various Municipal Corporations, including in Moradabad, Prayagraj and Meerut.
In 2017, the AIMIM had failed to win even half the seats it has won in 2023. “The success of the AIMIM in pockets of western U.P. signifies the disappointment of the Muslim electorate from traditional parties, primarily the SP. While the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) fielded 11 out of 17 mayoral candidates from the Muslim community, it also failed to make a major mark, loosing both the mayoral seats it held in 2017. The AIMIM rose at the cost of the SP and the BSP,” Mr. Pandey added.
