Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh’s state capital has been a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bastion for long now, with some top names from the BJP representing Lucknow.
Ever since 1991, the BJP hasn’t lost a single Lok Sabha election from Lucknow – from 1991 to 2009, Atal Bihari Vajpayee; from 2009 to 2014, Lal Ji Tandon and since 2014, Rajnath Singh. In 2017, when the BJP swept the entire state in the assembly elections, the story was no different in the state capital.
However, Lucknow’s Mohanlalganj (reserve) assembly seat was held by the Samajwadi Party for the past decade. In the 2017 assembly polls, SP’s Ambrish Pushkar had defeated Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Ram Bahadur by 530 votes. In 2012, the seat was held by the SP’s Chandra Rawat.
But this time, BJP’s Amresh Kumar scripted history by winning this seat for the first time since independence. He defeated SP’s Sushila Saroj by over 16,000 votes.
In Sarojini Nagar, the most high profile seat in Lucknow, former ED officer Rajeshwar Singh, who contested polls for the first time on a BJP ticket, defeated SP’s Abhishek Mishra by a margin of over 50,000 votes.
UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath flashes the victory sign during a roadshow, in support of BJP candidate Rajeshwar Singh for UP Assembly elections, in Lucknow, February 20, 2022. Photo: PTI/ Nand Kumar
BJP’s Ashutosh Tandon and Brajesh Pathak easily managed to retain Lucknow East and Cantonment seats.
In Bakshi kaa Talab too, the BJP’s Yogesh Shukla retained his seat by defeating his SP counterpart Gomti Yadav by over 27,000 votes.
Also read: From Changing Voting Patterns to BJP’s Primacy Solidified: How Dailies Are Viewing Election Results
In Malihabad, however, there was a closer contest. Jaya Devi, the wife of Union minister of state Kaushal Kishore, won the seat by around 8,000 votes.
The contest initially was initially close in the Lucknow North seat where SP fielded activist Pooja Shukla, who shot to fame after waving black flags at Yogi Adityanath’s convoy. But the BJP’s Neeraj Bora emerged victorious.
Shukla (25) was the youngest candidate in the state’s elections.
BJP leader and UP law minister Brajesh Pathak, who was contesting against SP’s Surendra Singh Gandhi, won the Lucknow Cantonment seat by around 40,000 votes.
While the saffron party bagged seven out of nine seats in the state capital, SP won the remaining two seats, Lucknow Central and Lucknow West.
SP veteran leader Ravidas Mehrotra won the Lucknow Central assembly seat with a margin of about 11,000 votes, by defeating BJP’s Rajnish Kumar Gupta. In 2017, Brajesh Pathak had defeated Mehrotra by a small margin of 5,094 votes. When Pathak was announced as the candidate from Lucknow Cantonment this time, it was being said that he changed his seat out of fear of losing to Mehrotra.
Congress candidate from Lucknow Central, Sadaf Jafar, the popular face of the anti-CAA protest, polled less than 3,000 votes.
Lucknow West, which has a sizeable Shia Muslim population, did not opt for the saffron party this time. SP’s Armaan Khan won this seat by defeating BJP’s Anjani Srivastava.
The BJP’s stalwart leader Lal Ji Tandon had represented this constituency thrice from 1996 to 2012.
