Lucknow: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the by-election to the Hamipur Assembly seat that fell vacant following the conviction of the sitting BJP MLA in a two-decade old murder case.
Party candidate Yuvraj Singh bagged 74,168 votes and won the election by a margin of 17,771 votes, while Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate Manoj Prajapati stood second with 56,397 votes and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate Naushad Ali got 28,749 votes.
Though BJP spokesperon Manish Shukla gave the credit of the win to welfare schemes and good governance by the state government, had the SP and BSP contested the election jointly, the scenario could have been different.
The performance of the BJP in bypolls since 2014 when the BJP came to power with Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister has not been particularly impressive and the party has been able to win only five of the 23 seats that saw by-elections during this period.
Barring the Sikandarabad Assembly seat in Kanpur, the BJP had lost four other bypolls, including the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat that was vacated by Adityanath after becoming the CM. Even the Phulpur seat vacated by Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya could not be retained by the saffron camp.
The SP and BSP had allied for the Phulpur, Kairana and Gorakhpur bypolls and won the seats. However, after a drubbing in the Lok Sabha elections, both the parties have decided to part ways. This was also the first time when the BSP had fielded its candidate for the Hamipur seat.
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