Congress President Rahul Gandhi in a press conference on Thursday conceded defeat to BJP's Smriti Irani in Amethi. Ten rounds of counting for the seat are yet to be held. Roughly 3 lakh votes are yet to be counted.
BJP’s candidate and Union Minister Smriti Irani is looking all set for a historic win in Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s bastion in Amethi.
With a margin of over 28,000 votes, Rahul has been trailing in the seat from where he has been chosen as the member of Parliament since 2004. However, in 2014 Smriti Irani gave him a tough contest and gathered over three lakh votes in the Parliamentary constituency.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won the Varanasi seat by an emphatic margin of 3.59 lakh votes. BJP's star candidate, Modi was seeking re-election to his current parliamentary seat, where he trounced dozens of rivals in one of the largest candidate fields in the 2014 election.
In the fray in Varanasi this year were Shalini Yadav, the candidate of the SP-BSP-RLD opposition alliance, and the Congressman Ajay Rai. Modi's win margin last year can be judged from the fact that runner Arvind Kejriwal lost by almost 3.7 lakh votes.
Here the latest development from UP election result:
-Wife of Samajwadi supremo and SP candidate Dimple Yadav trailing.
-The tenacity shown by the actor-turned politician seemed to have worked in her favour. Smriti stay put in Amethi for several months campaigning and interacting with the locals. On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi due to his national duties spent most of his time touring the country.
-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that was reduced to nil during 2014 general elections has been leading in 15 seats in Uttar Pradesh, according to early trends. The Samajwadi Party, on the other hand is leading on ten seats. Trends also suggest that BJP candidates in 52 seats have registered leads.
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-According to early trends, Uttar Pradesh's Jat dominated constituencies of Aligarh, Hathras, Baghpat, Bulandshahr and Muzaffarnagar seem to be siding with the BJP. RLD's Ajit Singh and Jayant Chaudhary did not seem to have an impact on influencing Jat votes in favour of the Mahagathbandhan.
-Trends coming in from early counting also suggests that BJP's Ravi Kishan is leading with a considerable margin in Gorakhpur. Now Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath had been continuously winning from the seat since 2004.
-As per early trends, BJP seems to have swept all of Central and Northern Uttar Pradesh. The Mahagathbandhan is leading only on those seats that has more than 50 percent cumulative population of Muslims, Yadavs and Dalits.
-In an other update, counting in almost ten seats in Uttar Pradesh has been disturbed.
-BJP has fielded Irani yet again in the hope that she will improve her performance from five years ago and snatch Amethi away from Gandhi. Irani has capitalised on Gandhi's absence and has accused him of running away from a fight.
-Early trends also suggest Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading in Varanasi and Congress's Imraan Masood is leading in Saharanpur.
-Samajwadi Party's Poonam Sinha, the wife of actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha, candidate from Lucknow Lok Sabha seat against Union home minister Rajnath Singh is trailing. Union minister and BJP's candidate from the seat, Rajnath Singh is leading.
In Uttar Pradesh, which is said to hold the key to power in New Delhi, is hosting some of the most exciting poll contests like Varanasi from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is fighting, Mainpuri from where SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav is fighting his last election, Amethi from where BJP leader Smriti Irani is giving a tough fight to Congress president Rahul Gandhi.The question here was always about not “whether” the BJP would lose seats, but “how many”, considering the landslide win last time and the stiff challenge posed by the coming together of erstwhile rivals, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, after the successive drubbings of 2014 and 2017.
-Samajwadi Party's candidate and wife of Akhilesh Yadav, Dimple Yadav leading with considerable margin in her seat.
-Manoj Sinha, Union minister and BJP's candidate in Ghazipur is trailing according to early counting.
-Sakshi Maharaj from BJP leading from Unnao.
-Former Congress President Sonia Gandhi leading in Raebareli.
-Congress's Imraan Masood is leading in Saharanpur.
-Azam Khan is leading from UP's Rampur seat against actor-turned-politician Jaya Prada.
Let’s look at the following important seats and indicators from perhaps the most crucial state-
-For most political pundits and psephologists, the electoral outcome was predicated on the strong caste foundations of the gathbandhan, which counted on the solidarity of the Backward and Dalit castes - that is the OBCs and SCs - along with the undisputed support from the strong Muslim population.
-Then, there was the Congress factor, equally baffling for both the alliance as well as the BJP. Though Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi claimed that her candidates if not winning will actually cut into BJP’s vote bank, the reality was that it would also hurt the alliance prospects on certain seats.
-Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking re-election to his current parliamentary seat in Varanasi, where he trounced dozens of rivals in one of the largest candidate fields in the 2014 election. In the fray in Varanasi this year are Shalini Yadav, the candidate of the SP-BSP-RLD opposition alliance, and the Congressman Ajay Rai. Modi's win margin last year can be judged from the fact that runner Arvind Kejriwal lost by almost 3.7 lakh votes.
-This is the last election for former Samajwadi party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav. The 79-year-old is fighting for his legacy from his stronghold, Mainpuri. In a historic moment, Mayawati called Yadav a real leader and in turn, Yadav urged his supporters to always respect Mayawati and said that he would never forget her gesture to campaign for him in his traditional seat.
-Former army chief and junior minister in the External Affairs Ministry VK Singh is pitted against Congress’s Dolly Sharma and gathbandhan candidate Suresh Bansal from Ghaziabad in western Uttar Pradesh. Though Singh won convincingly in 2014, he still carries around the ‘outside’ tag in Ghaziabad, owing to his Haryana origins. The seat remains a stronghold for BJP, with a large vote bank of Brahmin and Baniya voters. However, the seat is also home to 6 lakh people from SC communities and 5.5 lakh Muslims, who are likely to sway toward the SP-BSP combine. The Jat vote could become the deciding factor.
-In Saharanpur BJP retained their sitting MP, an upper caste candidate Raghav Lakhanpal. He had won this unreserved seat defeating Indian National Congress’ Imran Masood in 2014. Approximately 41 percent of the votes were polled in BJP’s favour in the last Lok Sabha polls. Congress too retained their candidate, Imran Masood from the Saharanpur seat in Uttar Pradesh. He had finished second during the 2014 elections. BSP’s Jagdish Singh Rana won the seat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and finished third in 2014. 6,267 votes were also polled for NOTA in 2014. Saharanpur has an estimated Scheduled Caste population of 22.32 percent and a Scheduled Tribe population of 0.04 percent. Although the political fate of the seat has swung between BSP, SP and BJP. The latter has won three out of the last six Lok Sabha elections.
-Gorakhpur considered a BJP bastion, the party has fielded Bhojpuri movie star Ravi Kishan from this seat, while the Samajwadi Party (SP) named Ram Bhuwal Nishad as their candidate. The Congress has fielded Madhusudan Tiwari. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has won this seat five times in a row and had to vacate it after assuming the charge of the chief minister. In 2014, Yogi Adityanath of the BJP defeated his rival by a margin of 3,12,783 or 30.1 per cent votes. After he vacated the seat, Samajwadi Party's Pravin Kumar Nishad won the 2018 bypolls. Pravin Kumar Nishad has now joined ranks with the BJP.
-Both sides courted Jats aggressively. The support of Jats will be crucial in West UP where the community has a direct influence in at least a dozen seats. So indicators from seats like Baghpat, Mathura, Muzaffarnagar and Fatehpur Sikri could help understand which side Jats weighed.
-Will Congress score more than two? Congress, being left out of MGB, decided to go its own way and expand its influence beyond Raebareli and Amethi, its traditional seats. The big question will be whether it gets a third, a fourth or possibly even a fifth through its former strongholds like Dhaurarha, Kushi Nagar, Unnao and Barabanki.
-How well will BJP perform in seats where arithemetic is in MGB’s favour? This will be a test of MGB’s attempt to transfer party votes and BJP’s attempt to not let this happen. These are the seats to look out for - Ghazipur’s 40% huge population is comprised of Yadavs, Muslims and Dalits; Amroha similarly has a sizeable population of Muslims and SCs and a chunk of Jat votes; Bijnor again has a sizeable Muslim population which added to a number of Dalits is likely to give MGB a lot of confidence