SP narrows gap with BJP in Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council vote
The Samajwadi Party won four of the ten declared seats in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council elections, while the BJP secured six, as the state approaches assembly polls.
The Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council elections resulted in a near tie between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Samajwadi Party (SP), with the BJP winning six of the ten seats declared so far and the SP taking four. The contests, held five months before the state assembly elections, covered graduate and teacher constituencies.
The SP captured the Lucknow Graduates seat, where candidate Kanti Singh Patel defeated incumbent BJP candidate Awanish Kumar Singh, and also won the Agra Teachers seat through Akash Agrawal. Additional SP victories included the Allahabad-Jhansi Graduates seat (Man Singh Yadav) and the Varanasi Teachers seat (Lal Bihari Yadav), who received 11,612 votes.
BJP winners were Dinesh Kumar Goyal in Meerut (Graduates), Manvendra Pratap Singh ‘Guru Ji’ in Agra (Graduates), and Umesh Dwivedi, Shrichand Sharma, Hari Singh Dhillon and Dhruv Kumar Tripathi in various teachers’ constituencies.
The results mark a shift from the 2020 council elections, when the BJP had secured six seats, the SP three, and independents two. SP leader Akhilesh Yadav posted on X that the outcome had dealt a setback to the BJP.