BJP suffered a huge setback on Wednesday when it lost four of the five seats in the bypolls including the all-important Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats in UP to the SP-BSP alliance. The saffron party’s alliance with JDU in Bihar failed to wrench Araria parliamentary seat from RJD. The BJP only managed to retain Bhabhua assembly seat while its ally JDU’s candidate was defeated in Jehanabad by RJD.
SP candidate Pravin Kumar Nishad won Gorakhpur seat defeating BJP’s Upendra Dutt Shukla by a margin of 21, 881 votes. While in Phulpur, BJP candidate Kaushlendra Singh was defeated by SP candidate Nagendra Singh by a margin of 59,613 seats.
Significantly, Gorakhpur was earlier represented by chief minister Yogi Adityanath and Phulpur was held by his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya.
In Araria, the BJP-JDU combine failed to defeat RJD candidate Sarfaraz Alam, son of former minister Taslimuddin despite RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav being in jail after after his conviction in fodder scam cases. Sarfaraz defeated his BJP rival Pradeep Kumar Singh by a margin of 61,788 votes.
The by-election results have given the Opposition a huge boost, particularly at a time when many of them are considering to join hands to challenge the Modi-Shah duo in 2019 Lok Sabha election.
