The BJP bagged eight of these 10 seats as against the SP’s two, even though the Akhilesh Yadav-led party was poised to win three seats based on the number of its legislators.
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The BJP managed to get its eighth nominee, industrialist Sanjay Seth, elected while the SP’s third candidate, ex-bureaucrat Alok Ranjan, lost as seven of the SP MLAs cross-voted.
The Upper House polls were billed as the first litmus test for the INDIA bloc, whose constituents in the state now include the SP and the Congress. After the setback that the SP got, some of the alliance leaders fear that it may even impact the allies’ prospects in some key “winnable” seats in the Lok Sabha polls.
The Rajya Sabha poll results also saw the Congress training its guns on the BSP, which it had been avoiding so far in a bid to woo the party into the INDIA fold.
State Congress president Ajay Rai said, “The way lone BSP MLA (Uma Shankar Singh) voted for BJP in Rajya Sabha polls has made the intentions of BSP clear that it is working as B-team of BJP.”
He pointed out that both Congress MLAs, Aradhana Mishra and Virendra Chaudhary, voted for the SP’s candidates.
The Congress camp also expressed surprise that the SP was caught off-guard even as Akhilesh’s trusted faces like the SP’s chief whip Manoj Pandey quit while the polling was still underway.
Of the SP MLAs who cross-voted in favour of the BJP candidates, Manoj Pandey represents the Unchahar Assembly segment of the Raebareli Lok Sabha seat, while
Rakesh Pratap Singh represents the Gauriganj Assembly seat in the Amethi parliamentary constituency.
Also, Maharaji Prajapati, wife of former SP minister Gayatri Prajapati, who is an SP MLA from the Amethi Assembly constituency, skipped voting.
Raebareli and Amethi are among the few remaining strongholds of the Congress in UP. In the 2019 polls, Rahul Gandhi lost from Amethi to the BJP’s Smriti Irani, while Sonia Gandhi retained her Raebareli seat.
Sonia has now bid farewell to electoral politics and her Raebareli seat, choosing to get elected to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan. She is likely to be replaced by Priyanka, her daughter, as the Congress candidate from Raebareli.
The presence of “rebel” SP faces in Raebareli and Amethi has spooked the Congress, which is going to review its poll plans for these “seats of significance”, a party leader said.
The ruling BJP claims that senior party leaders like Daya Shankar Singh, Deputy CM Brijesh Pathak and parliamentary affairs minister Suresh Khanna were in touch with the rebel SP legislators.
Of Raebareli’s five Assembly segments, the SP had won four — Bacharawan, Harchandpur, Sareni and Unchahar — in the 2022 Assembly polls. Only the Raebareli Sadar seat was won by the BJP which had given its ticket to then Congress rebel Aditi Singh.
Even without an alliance, the SP used to leave Amethi and Raebareli seats for the Congress in the previous polls. With the two parties now sealing a seat-sharing deal – under which the SP gave the Congress 17 seats, including Raebareli and Amethi, out of the state’s 80 seats – the grand old party expected proactive support from the local SP MLAs in these constituencies.
For the SP, the Upper House poll outcome has thrown up a larger challenge as it needs to urgently set its house in order.
The eight ‘rebel’ SP MLAs include three Brahmin faces, two Thakur leaders, two from the backward communities and one Dalit leader. The party is expected to recalibrate its strategies for the Lok Sabha polls, which are barely one-and-a-half months away.
Asked about the alliance’s road map in the wake of the Rajya Sabha polls, Ajay Rai told The India Express, “The Congress followed the alliance dharma as our both MLAs voted for the SP candidates, but it is for SP to see what went wrong.”