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‘Acche din’ for Mulayam in UP
Shahira Naim
Tribune News Service

Of 11 seats, SP wins 8 Halting the saffron juggernaut, the SP wrested 8 out of 11 seats from the BJP. The victory of t Mulayam’s grand nephew Tej Pratap Singh Yadav from Mainpuri LS seat came as an add-on Tej won by a margin of 3,21,249 votes defeating BJP’s Prempal Shakya Three generations of the Yadav first family would now sit in Parliament

Lucknow, September 16
By retaining the Lok Sabha seat of Mainpuri by 3.20 lakh votes and wresting eight of the 11 Vidhan Sabha seats from the BJP, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh has stopped the saffron juggernaut in its track.

The results come exactly four months after the Lok Sabha elections were won by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the promise of ushering in ‘acche din’ by replicating the Gujarat model of development.

Uttar Pradesh bypoll results instead brought ‘acche din’ for the Samajwadi Party as it proved that BJP’s poll main agenda in UP of polarizing votes by highlighting issues like ‘love jihad, cow slaughter and forced conversion failed to cut much ice with the majority of the electorate outside the urban centres.

A visibly elated Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav thanked the voter for decisively rejecting “divisive politics based on religious hatred” and for supporting Samajwadi Party’s inclusive policies. Adding a feather to the Samajwadi Party cap is the victory of SP president Mulayam Singh Yadav’s grand nephew Tej Pratap Singh Yadav from Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat by a margin of a whopping 3,21,249 votes. In a direct fight he defeated BJP rival Prempal Shakya.

Three generations of the Yadav first family would now sit in Parliament, which is a feat of sorts.

Refusing to accept the party’s backward looking agenda as a cause of the reverse, Yogi Adityanath instead shifted the blame, saying that he was prevented to campaign in all the constituencies. This, he said, was a cause of the BJP defeat.

If Modi and his promise of development fetched the BJP unprecedented success in May 2014, the campaign led by BJP national president Amit Shah’s handpicked team of three star campaigners – Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, BJP state president Laxmikant Bajpai and Deoria MP and union minister Kalraj Mishra cost the BJP eight Assembly seats.