Team News Riveting
Lucknow, July 3
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recorded a landslide victory in the Zila Panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh.
The BJP won 67 of the 75 Zila Panchayats in the state while its allies won 3 Zila Panchayats. In a major jolt to Akhilesh Yadav, Samajwadi Party (SP) could win only 5 Zila Panchayats and lost its bastion Mainpuri for the first time in 30 years.
Mulayam Singh Yadav, the founder of the Samajwadi Party and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, represents Mainpuri in the Lok Sabha.
The BJP candidate also won in Rae Bareli, represented in the Lok Sabha by interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi and considered a stronghold of the Gandhi-Nehru family.
The BJP also broke the record of SP that had secured 63 Zila Panchayats. BJP had comfortably won in 67. It won 21 Zila Panchayats unopposed, including Varanasi, the constituency represented in the Lok Sabha by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
According to the State Election Commission, polling began at 11 am on Saturday and continued till 3 pm and the counting of votes began right after that.
Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath congratulated BJP candidates for securing a massive mandate in Zila Panchayat polls. He attributed the win to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s welfare schemes.
The Zila Panchayat election was seen as a semi final ahead of next year’s state polls. While the opposition parties were designing strategies to take on BJP, the panchayat election results had devastated its plan.
