New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faces its toughest challenge from the Mahagathbandhan (MGB) in the next round of voting in Uttar Pradesh on May 12 as the electoral arithmetic favours the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance on almost all the 14 seats going to polls.
The BJP had swept the region in 2014 winning all except Azamgarh but it will take nothing less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma to repeat the performance as number crunching shows MGB to be on a stronger wicket, at least on paper.
In Phulpur, the seat from where the MGB experiment started, the BJP has already witnessed the alliance strength as it lost the constituency in 2018 bypolls.
If votes polled by SP and BSP candidates in 2014 are taken into account and if the two parties have their traditional vote-base intact, then the BJP runs the risk of losing all these 14 seats in phase 6 barring perhaps Pratapgarh.
The BJP will bank heavily on the vote-swaying power of the Prime Minister as his campaign blitzkrieg might break the traditional vote bank barriers.
After five rounds, fate of the candidates on 53 out of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh has already been sealed and till now the BJP and MGB are placed evenly in terms of number equation. But in Round 6, MGB poses the strongest resistance to the BJP.
BJP’s toughest battle against Mahagathbhadhan in UP’s phase 6 of LS polls:
Stakes are high for MGB leader Akhilesh Yadav who is contesting from Azamgarh, a seat won by his father Mulayam Singh Yadav in 2014. He is facing popular Bhojpuri actor Dinesh Lal Yadav “Nirhua” who has been fielded by the BJP to break the Yadav stronghold.
Fate of BJP leader Maneka Gandhi will also be decided as she is contesting from Sultanpur, a seat held by her son Varun Gandhi.
In Pratapgarh, BJP’s Kuwar Harivansh had polled 3,75,789 votes in 2014 which is more than the combined votes polled by SP and BSP candidates.
This time, the BJP has fielded Sangam Lal Gupta, who is facing Ashok Kumar Tripathi of MGB and Ratna Singh of the Congress in a triangular contest which favours the BJP.
Ratna Singh had got 1,38,620 votes in the last elections. The seat has sizeable presence of the Congress.
But a lot of equations have changed between 2014 and 2019 which will have bearing on the outcome of the polls.
BJP’ sitting MP in Allahabad Shyam Charan Gupta is now the SP candidate from Banda. Another BJP MP, Ram Charitra Nishad from Machhlishehr also joined the SP.
