The Bharatiya Janata Party has suffered a grave setback in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar on March 14, losing four of the five seats in the bypolls, including the key seats of Gorakhpur and Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh.
With this shock, the BJP is down to 274 seats in Lok Sabha from its 2014 score of 282. Both the UP seats were won by re-stitched alliance between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), strongly indicating that alliance likely to pose an unbeatable challenge to BJP in 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
The shock value is extremely high only because BJP has lost Gorakhpur’s seat which is a heartland of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath while Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya had held the Phulpur seat. CM Adityanath has been winning the constituency since 1998 but last-minute stitched alliance by Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav and Ram Gopal Yadav has proven to be unbeatable for BJP.
SP wins Gorakhpur seat by 21,900 votes and Phulpur seat by 59, 460 votes. BJP had won both the seats by around 3 lakh votes in 2014.
