Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi.
Credit: X/@INCIndia
Lucknow: The coming general election may throw some surprising results in Uttar Pradesh with the SP-BSP alliance now replaced by the SP-Congress pact under the I.N.D.I.A. bloc.
The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance in 2019 had offered some resistance to the BJP on a handful of seats in the western and eastern parts of UP, but failed to make a big impact.
With BSP supremo Mayawati deciding to duke it out alone this time, it will be up to the SP and Congress to stop the marauding juggernaut of the NDA, which has now has RLD on its side, as well as a number of caste-based regional parties in the Poorvanchal region.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP and allies won 73 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
The party ceded some ground in the 2019 general election, when the opposition parties scraped their combined tally to 16.
Even with the conventional anti-incumbency apprehensions at work, the saffron party laid its claim on the state winning 62 seats, bolstered further by two more won by its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal).
In 2019, the maximum seats -- 23 -- for the BJP came from the state's western part, where the SP-BSP alliance could manage to win only four seats each.
The BSP won Saharanpur, Bijnor, Amroha and Nagina (SC seat) in the western UP, while the Samajwadi Party emerged victorious in Sambhal, Moradabad, Mainpuri (first held by Mulayam Singh Yadav then by Dimple Yadav in a bypoll) and Rampur that year.
The central region of the state has prominent parliamentary constituencies of Amethi and Rae Bareli -- both long considered bastions of the Congress.
In 2019, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi retained her Rae Bareli seat, while her son Rahul Gandhi lost the long held Amethi constituency to Union minister Smriti Irani.
Defence minister Rajnath Singh won from Lucknow.
The BSP won only one seat from this region in Ritesh Pandey, who bagged Ambedkarnagar Lok Sabha constituency. The SP scored a zilch.
The BJP won 13 seats from the region, which includes the coveted Faizabad Lok Sabha seat, the epicentre of a Hindu reverie that drowned parts of the nation in a collective religious fervour after the Ram Temple consecration.
Varanasi, represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha, is one of the 30 seats in the eastern part of the state.
From this region, the BSP won five seats, while the SP won one, Azamgarh. Apna Dal (Sonelal) won two seats from here.
The Bundelkhand region was swept in 2019 by the BJP, which won all four Lok Sabha seats of Jhansi, Banda, Hamirpur, and Jalaun-SC.
The parched Bundelkhand region has been seeing the start of some irrigation projects and its residents getting safe drinking water.
Expressways, new airports in different parts of the UP have narrowed the regional disparity the state has witnessed for a long time.