UP bypolls give BSP a morale booster

While the Congress lost its deposit in three of the constituencies,state party president Rita Bahuguna Joshi drew consolation from the fact that its voteshare had “increased significantly” in all the four Assembly segments.

For the SP,however,the election results came as a major damper. Not only did it lose two seats,its candidates forfeited their security deposit in Moradabad (West) and Morna. BJP candidates,too,lost their security deposit in Malihabad and Bidhuna.

Triumphant,Chief Minister Mayawati said the poll results showed that the voters had rejected the “malicious campaign against the BSP” by the Congress and other Opposition parties and had embraced the ‘Sarvajan Hitay’ policy of the BSP government.

Mayawati said that BSP’s only loss,in Morna,was by a narrow margin. “We lost the Morna seat as the BSP,SP and Congress had fielded Muslim candidates,which benefitted RLD candidate Mithilesh Pal,” said the BSP chief.

The losing parties are now crying foul,with both Mulayam Singh Yadav and state BJP vice-president HN Dikshit alleging that the BSP had misused the official machinery.

Incidentally,all four by-elections were necessitated when the sitting MLAs defected to the BSP on the eve of the Lok Sabha polls. Only Kadir Rana,who was MLA from Morna,was elected from Muzaffarnagar as a BSP candidate.

The BSP candidates who emerged victorious were Balram Singh (Moradabad),Sidharth Shankar (Malihabad) and Mahesh Chandra Verma (Bidhuna). In Morna,Mithilesh Pal of the RLD defeated Noor Salim Rana of the BSP by a margin of 4,584 votes.

Now,the BSP’s strength in the 403-member Legislative Assembly goes up to 218 and the RLD’s to 10. The SP has 87 members,BJP 48 and Congress 19. The Assembly also has eight Independents and one member of the Rashtriya Swabhiman Party. The House still has 12 vacancies.