Samajwadi Party flag.
Credit: PTI File Photo.
Lucknow: To achieve its goal of winning 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP is relying heavily on Uttar Pradesh.
The state sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha and though the saffron party has roped in smaller caste-based outfits aiming for a clean sweep, the task looks anything but easy.
A major roadblock for the BJP is the Samajwadi Party (SP), which is expected to do well in the eastern and central regions. Also, there are around a dozen LS seats where the saffron party had barely managed to garner a few thousand votes in 2019.
In the 2019 polls, the BJP, with its alliance partners, Nishad Party and Apna Dal (Anupriya Patel), had bagged 64 seats. The SP and BSP, which had contested together, won 15 seats and Congress got one seat.
Of the 64 seats won by the BJP and its allies, the victory margin in as many as 10 seats was a few thousand votes with at least one seat (Machli Shahar) going to the BJP by a margin of 181 votes. On three such seats, the BJP’s victory margin was less than 10,000 votes.
Similarly, the BJP could win the Firozabad LS seat, considered to be a stronghold of the SP, by around 29,000 votes. In 2019, Akhilesh’s uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav was in the fray here and he had polled over 91,000 votes. This time, however, Shivpal is with Akhilesh and the BJP may face a tough fight in Firozabad.
The Shivpal factor had impacted the SP in 2019 in its stronghold Kannauj where SP president Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav lost to BJP's Subrat Pathak by over 12,000 votes.
In Meerut, BJP’s Rajendra Agarwal had defeated the SP candidate Haji Yaqoob by less than 5,000 votes. Similarly, BJP nominee Sanjiv Baliyan merely scraped through in Muzaffarnagar by a little over 6,000 votes.
SP’s Dharmendra Yadav had lost in Badaun by over 18,000 votes.
Local BJP leaders said the party had been working on these seats for the past five years and that its margin of victory would increase this time. The SP leaders, however, feel that with a little extra effort, the party may wrest some of these seats from the BJP.