It’s not Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but Yogi Adityanath’s administration and Uttar Pradesh’s “zero tolerance against mafia” that has eventually brought land-sliding win to the party in all 17 seats, according to political experts.
The BJP bagged all 17 mayoral seats, setting a record, whereas the counting for the post of councillors, municipal council presidents, member municipal councils and municipal council members was still in progress on Saturday evening.
In the previous urban local bodies polls held in 2017, the BJP had won 14 out of 16 municipal corporations, while the remaining Meerut and Aligarh were won by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
BJP’s walkover came as a rude shock to the Samajwadi Party (SP) and BSP, which lost Meerut and Aligarh this time.
“It’s a historical win for any party, which has won all the mayoral seats. Unlike in previous years, when the civic issues including sewage, overflowing manholes, potholed roads and others took a back seat, the issue of administration rules the roost. I must say that urban voters voted for Yogi, his administration and his zero tolerance policy against mafia and mafia raj, resulting in the landslide victory,” said SK Dwivedi, former head of department of political science, University of Lucknow.
Another political expert, Kaushal Kishore Mishra, former head of the department of political science, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), echoes similar views. He believes that “urban voters are smart”, and want to live in a safe, “mafia-free environment to give a better future to their families”. And that’s why people chose Yogi Adityanath’s administration to handle civic issues.
He also gave the credit of BJP’s victory to the chief minister’s campaigning that brought the final change in the voting pattern.
Professor Shashikant Pandey, Department of Political Science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, said continuing its victory from Lok Sabha to Vidhan Sabha and now municipal elections in Uttar Pradesh, BJP has made its dominance felt in the Hindi heartland. “It not only establishes the credibility of Yogi Adityanath in UP politics but has also sent a message to the party echelons that he is a mass leader,” Pandey said.
He also added that Yogi Adityanath has firmly established himself as a strong leader, which reflects that a fairly large segment of population in Uttar Pradesh likes his style of working and politics.
Giving another perspective, Pandey said, “One can also infer that there was nothing new and the result was along expected lines. BJP, being in power, was in an advantageous position and Yogi Adityanath aggressively campaigned and laid from the front, whereas the SP and its leader Akhilesh Yadav was hardly there. The BSP and Congress were nowhere in the reckoning and BSP’s strategic move to field a maximum number of Muslim candidates may have been more damaging to the SP and advantageous for BJP. So long as the opposition remains fractured, the BJP will continue to dominate UP politics. This municipal election result clearly reflects this trend.”
The Uttar Pradesh Urban Local Body Elections 2023 (Nagar Nigam, Nagar Palika and Nagar Panchayat) held the first phase on May 4, which saw 46% turnout.
To elect urban body chiefs in 37 districts of UP across 10 municipal corporations, around 2 crore 40 lakh people cast their vote. In the second phase, the polling was held on May 11 to elect representatives for the posts across 760 local bodies in the state.
The BJP had fielded 10,758 candidates (including 4,248 women), the highest among all the parties. The SP gave tickets to 5,231 (2,223 women) – the second highest –, followed by the BSP’s 3,787 (1,611 women). The Congress and AAP fielded 2,994 (1,395 women) and 2,447 (1,031 women) candidates.
More than 46% of the candidates fielded by the Congress are women and this appears to be higher than that of all other main political players. Among the BJP candidates, 39.48% were women, which is lower than that of the BSP (42.54%), the SP (42.49%) and AAP (42%).
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