* Samajwadi Party, RJD win key seats in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar

In results that can set the tone for the 2019 general elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party yesterday suffered a severe jolt in the Lok Sabha and assembly by-elections in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The BJP lost four of five seats, including the prestigious Gorakhpur and Phulpur parliamentary constituencies, after rival parties teamed up in alliances in the two states.
The BJP also lost the Araria Lok Sabha constituency and the Jehanabad assembly seat while scoring a consolation win in Bhabhua assembly seat in Bihar. The results in both states triggered calls for a Grand Alliance all across India to take on the BJP in the next Lok Sabha elections.
After sweeping the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and the assembly polls last year, BJP faced formidable rivals in Uttar Pradesh in the form of Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party who stitched a last-minute alliance. BSP supremo Mayawati had announced the backing of her party for SP candidates in both the constituencies in return for SP’s support to her party candidate in the Rajya Sabha biennial elections.
The BJP lost Gorakhpur seat to the SP by a margin of 21,961 votes. SP candidate Pravin Kumar Nishad got 456,437 votes while the BJP’s Upendra Dutt Shukla secured 4,34,476 votes. Congress candidate Sureetha Kareem polled 18,844 votes.
Yogi Adityanath, who had represented Gorakhpur seat in the Lok Sabha for five times, winning the last elections in 2014 with a margin of 313,000 votes, resigned from the seat after he was became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Before him, his mentor Yogi Avaidyanath was the MP from the seat for two terms, in 1991 and 1993.
In the Phulpur constituency, which was once represented by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, SP candidate Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel defeated Kaushalendra Singh of the BJP by 59,613 votes.
The winner polled 342,796 votes while the BJP candidate got 283,183. Former mafia don-turned politician Ateeq Ahmed secured 48,087 votes while the Congress’s Manish Mishra polled 19,334 votes.
The SP was the runner-up in Gorakhpur many times, while it had won the Phulpur seat four times since 1996. The BJP won Phulphur Lok Sabha seat for the first time in 2014 when Keshav Prasad Maurya, who is now the deputy chief minister won by a margin of over 300,000 votes.
In 2014, BJP and its ally Apna Dal had won 73 of 80 Lok Sabha seats and 325 out of 403 seats in the 2017 assembly elections.
“This is a rejection of both (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi and Yogi (Adityanath),” Samajwadi Party spokesman Anurag Bhaudauria said.
“They have been making tall promises but not delivering on the ground,” he said, explaining why the voters appeared to have turned against the BJP so dramatically in these two seats since the 2014 Lok Sabha battle.
In a rare show of camaraderie, Samajwadi Party leaders admitted that the BSP decision to back their party played a critical role in the outcome.
In neighbouring Bihar, the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) dealt a stunning blow to the saffron party and its ally Janata Dal-United headed by Chief Minister Nitsh Kumar when it bagged the Araria Lok Sabha seat.
The RJD’s Sarfaraz Alam defeated BJP candidate Pradeep Kumar Singh by over 60,000 votes in Araria.
In Jehanabad assembly constituency, Suday Yadav of the RJD defeated JD-U’s Abhiram Sharma by 35,036 votes while BJP’s Rinki Pandey scored over Sambhu Patel of the Congress, an RJD ally, by 15,000 votes in Bhabua assembly constituency.
It was a direct fight between the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the Grand Alliance of the RJD-Congress in Bihar, a year ahead of the next Lok Sabha battle. With the original Grand Alliance having come apart after the JD-U deserted it and joined hands with the BJP, there was a lot at stake for everyone in the by-elections: the RJD, JD-U, BJP and Congress.
Workers of SP and RJD celebrated across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar by distributing sweets and bursting firecrackers.
RJD workers beat drums and raised slogans hailing party chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, who is in jail for corruption, and his son Tejashwi Yadav, who asked opposition leaders to join hands at the national level to take on the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha battle.