New Delhi: Amid allegations of electoral manipulation raised by the Opposition, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) scripted a victory in the Milkipur Assembly bypoll in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya by a record margin of over 61,000 votes.
The BJP’s Chandrabhanu Paswan defeated the Samajwadi Party’s (SP’s) Ajit Prasad by 61,710 votes to wrest Milkipur from the main Opposition party. The margin was the highest ever in the constituency, which went to polls after the sitting MLA Awadhesh Prasad, Ajit Prasad’s father, was elected as the Member of Parliament from the Faizabad seat last summer.
With the victory in Milkipur, the BJP continued its successful streak of wins in bypoll elections following last year’s setback in the Lok Sabha polls, when the Opposition won more seats in the key northern state than the saffron party.
The voting on February 5 was marred by allegations of voting fraud, intimidation of SP booth agents and attempts by the police and officials to influence the voting in favour of the saffron party. The constituency recorded a surprising 65.35% turnout in the bypoll, a remarkable jump of more than 5% from the 2022 Assembly election.
Bypolls have traditionally recorded a lower turnout than general elections. As reported by The Wire, the SP had accused the Ayodhya police of lodging criminal cases based on identical charges of assault and intimidation against key party officer-bearers and workers. The party had alleged that the police were lodging “false cases” to influence the election and even wrote to the Election Commission (EC) demanding the removal of the station house officers of three police stations.
SP president Akhilesh Yadav questioned the BJP’s win, alleging that it was “electoral fraud” carried out through the “manipulation of officials.” Yadav said the BJP’s was a “fake victory.”
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“BJP cannot face the growing power of PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Aplsankhyak, meaning OBC, Dalit and Minorities) on the basis of votes, that is why it tries to win by misusing the electoral system,” said Yadav.
“The level of manipulation of officials required to do such electoral fraud may be possible in one assembly, but this ‘420′ (fraud) will not work in 403 assemblies (the total number of constituencies in UP),” he added.
Yadav, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, also had a word of warning for officials he accused of electoral manipulation. They will be “punished for the crime against democracy, if not today then tomorrow,” said Yadav. The BJP had won seven out of nine seats in bypolls held last November, in a similar fashion amid large-scale complaints of communally-targetted voter suppression and misuse of administrative machinery.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath was ecstatic after the victory. He said the Milkipur victory was a “symbol of common people’s unwavering faith in the public welfare politics of the ‘double engine BJP government,” led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the state government “dedicated to service, security and good governance.”
Adityanath also said that the result had put a “full stop to the politics of lies and loot.”
The BJP’s candidate Paswan got over 1.46 lakh votes and recorded over 60% of the votes in an unexpectedly one-sided victory. This was only the second time the BJP managed to win this seat in the last three decades.
The BJP’s victory margin was also unexpected. The runner-up, SP’s Prasad, received a decent 84,687 votes but it was well short of the winner’s tally.
To compare, in 2022, when the BJP’s sitting MLA Baba Gorakhnath lost his seat to Awadhesh Prasad, the saffron party had secured 90,567 votes, while the SP won with a tally of 1.04 lakh votes.
In 2017, when the BJP stormed to power in the state, Gorakhnath defeated Awadhesh Prasad with a handsome margin. While Gorakhnath received 86,960 votes, the senior Prasad could only managed 58,684 votes in the election in which the SP was voted out of power.
