BJP sweeps UP civic polls

NEW DELHI: After its sweep in Delhi’s municipal election, BJP maintained its dominance in the urban local bodies by cornering nine out of 12 mayoral posts in UP.

BJP swept UP municipal corporation elections and even improved its tally over 2007 by one seat. Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party help BJP in sweeping the elections as they abstained from the polls and only supported candidates. This saw independent candidates winning in Allahabad, Ghaziabad and Bareilly.

For Congress, the only other principal party to have contested, civic elections were just an extension of its defeat in the assembly polls. In many cities, local parties like Peace Party gave competition to BJP finishing a close second.

BJP’s Dinesh Sharma won the prestigious mayoral seat in Lucknow for the second consecutive time by defeating Congress’s Neeraj Bora by a huge margin of more than 1 lakh votes. In Bareilly, SP backed IS Tomar defeated BJP’s Gulshan Anand.

BJP’s Bina Agrawal defeated Peace Party candidate in Moradabad while Shankuntala Bharti defeated Rajia Khan, an independent, in Aligarh. Similarly, Kiran Raj Bookseller won in Jhansi by defeating Nirmala, an independent, and Satya Pandey defeated Congress’s Sujit Karim in Gorakhpur.

BJP candidates had taken an early lead over their rivals for Varanasi, Kanpur, Agra and Meerut municipal corporations while its candidates were defeated by independents in Allahabad and Ghaziabad. Saharanpur, which was recently upgraded as a municipal corporation, will go to polls later. The commission has not announced any results yet for the nagar parishads and nagar panchayats.

BJP was quick to term its victory as a verdict against the UPA government’s policies. “People of UP have given a clear verdict against policies of Congress and its allies in the local body elections. They are fed up with the corruption, lawlessness and price rise,” BJP vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said. “Congress, SP and BSP have been wiped out in the elections and BJP has won maximum seats in the civic elections,” he said.

Taking a dig at Congress, Naqvi said: “the party could not even win any seat in Amethi and Rae Bareli. This is a clear indication…Congress lost all the three seats they had won earlier.

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