When the Lok Sabha election results came in on June 4 last year, the BJP was left searching for answers, as its tally dropped from 303 to 242. Among the losses that left the party red-faced was Faizabad, the constituency in Uttar Pradesh where Ayodhya is located. The defeat likely stung even more as it came months after the Ram Temple was inaugurated, marking the successful conclusion of one of the BJP’s biggest ideological projects that had been decades in the making. On Saturday, the party avenged that loss to a large extent by winning the Milkipur Assembly bypoll and defeating Samajwadi Party (SP) MP Awadhesh Prasad, the man who won Faizabad last year, on his turf. The BJP’s Chandrabhanu Paswan defeated Awadhesh’s son Ajit Prasad by 61,710 votes. In 2024, the SP had a lead of 8,000 votes from the Milkipur Assembly segment, down from 13,338 when Awadhesh won the seat in the 2022 UP Assembly elections. For the BJP, the effort to win back Milkipur started immediately after the Faizabad loss. “After Awadhesh Pradesh was elected, a video went viral on social media. In it, SP president Akhilesh Yadav was seen calling Prasad ‘Ayodhya ka raja’. It did not sit well with the people of Ayodhya. Ahead of the bypolls, party workers stayed hours at paan and tea shops in Milkipur and initiated discussions in which they talked about the SP going against Sanatan Dharma by calling its MP the king of Ayodhya. That sentiment worked in our favour,” said a BJP leader. The leader said the questions that people from the constituency faced about not voting for the BJP even after the Ram temple was inaugurated played a role in the voters of Milkipur course-correcting in the by-election. While the Opposition INDIA bloc’s Lok Sabha election campaign around the “Constitution under threat” narrative — that a BJP with a 400-plus mandate would pose a threat to the Constitution and system of reservation — had helped swing Dalit votes towards it and damaged the BJP across India, it was no longer effective this time around. Still, as a precaution, the BJP deputed its former MP Lallu Singh, who lost to Awadhesh, in only one mandal unit dominated by upper-caste voters. The BJP also identified like-minded voters and ensured that at least half of them cast their votes. The party also deployed a massive army of foot soldiers from other constituencies, numbering over 2,000, and tasked them with reaching out to voters at least four times over the past few months. More than nine state ministers and 40 MLAs were also deployed for canvassing, with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath himself taking charge of the campaign. “There was no negativity against the BJP this time. Also, there was no mood in the SP’s favour. The BJP focused on increasing polling of its votes. The RSS, too, helped us in this exercise,” said a leader. Candidate selection and caste equations Changing the candidate, too, worked for the BJP. The party opted for Paswan, a young face, instead of an experienced leader such as former MLA Baba Gorakhnath who lost to Awadesh in 2022. “There was some anger among Brahmins against Gorakhnath since 2022 and because of that he lost in 2022 and BJP did not get Brahmin votes in Milkipur in 2024. Changing the candidate helped BJP in getting Brahmin votes,” said another BJP leader. There are 62,000 Brahmin and around 20,000 Thakur voters in the constituency. The consolidation of these votes helped the party, which claimed it did not receive any support from minority areas. The estimated strength of Muslim voters in the constituency with over 3.71 lakh voters is 52,000. With the Bahujan Samaj Party not contesting, the Dalit Jatav vote got divided between the BJP and the Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshiram) of Chandrashekhar Azad. Unlike the Lok Sabha polls, when a fraction of the Jatav votes went to the SP, this time, that too did not go in the Opposition party’s bag. There are 1.2 lakh Dalit voters in the seat, of whom around 70,000 are from the Pasi community. The SP has alleged electoral malpractices, with party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Sunday labelling it the BJP’s “fake win”. He said, “Those who are showing arrogance after looting Milkipur, they should understand that the fake win of Milkipur can not balance the defeat of Ayodhya in the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP's Ayodhya defeat has been recorded in history forever. One can not take revenge for that by winning Milkipur.” SP leader Abhishek Yadav who was in charge of the party’s bypoll efforts also alleged cheating and bogus voting. “The SP too had marked voters. We worked among voters. We were apprehensive about the BJP cheating in the election. And the BJP did that by getting the votes of absent voters polled. The BJP engaged in bogus voting with the help of the polling staff and the administration,” he alleged.
