The trends led to uproarious scenes in the UP assembly as SP members celebrated, leading speaker Hriday Narayan Dixit to adjourn the house briefly.
Lucknow : Samajwadi Party (SP) candidates were leading in the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh after initial rounds of counting for the by-elections, election officials said.
SP candidates in the two seats are contesting with the support of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as part of an arrangement to beat the BJP.
In BJP bastion Gorakhpur, which elected Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath to Parliament in five elections, and his mentor Yogi Avaidyanath twice on the party’s ticket (Avaidyanath won two other elections from Gorakhpur on a Hindu Mahasabha), party candidate Upendra Dutt Shukla was trailing the SP’s Praveen Nishad by over 1,500 votes at the end of the third round of counting.
Gorakhpur district magistrate Rajeev Rautela, also the returning officer, announced that, after the third round of counting, Nishad had 44,979 votes and Shukla 43,457. Congress candidate Sureetha Kareem was a distant third with 1,712 votes.
In Phulpur, where now-deputy-CM Keshav Prasad Maurya rode the Modi wave to victory in 2014, SP candidate Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel was leading by 8,199 votes after seven rounds of counting, election officials said.
BJP candidate Kaushalendra Patel was second, and Independent Atique Ahmed, contesting from jail, third, followed by the Congress.
But updates on TV channels put the SP lead at more than 19,000 votes in Gorakhpur and more than 20,000 votes in Phulpur at 1.40 pm Wednesday.
The trends led to uproarious scenes in the UP assembly as SP members celebrated, leading speaker Hriday Narayan Dixit to adjourn the house briefly. There was also controversy as leader of the opposition Ram Gobind Chaudhary told the speaker that mediapersons were “being barred from entering the counting centre at Gorakhpur”, describing it as a “murder of democracy”.
The final results are expected later in the afternoon, an Election Commission (EC) official said.
The polls were necessitated by the vacation of the seats by Adityanath and Maurya following their election to the UP legislative council.
The bypolls were termed by Adityanath a “rehearsal” for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The Bihar story
The UP bypolls were held along with those for Bihar’s Araria parliamentary constituency and Jehanabad and Bhabua assembly constituencies.
In Araria, vacant since the death of RJD incumbent Mohd Taslimuddin in September 2017, the BJP was leading by over 4,000 votes after three hours of counting, according to figures provided by the Election Commission at 11am.
The BJP’s Pradeep Kumar Singh was up against the RJD’s Sarfaraz Alam, Taslimuddin’s son.
The party was also in the lead in Bhabua, with candidate Rinky Rani Pandey ahead of her closest rival by over 2,500 votes. It was the death of her husband Anand Bhushan Pandey in November last year that necessitated the election.
In Jehanabad, the RJD’s Kumar Krishna Mohan alias Suday Yadav had a lead of more than 15,000 votes over JD (U) rival Abhiram Sharma. The seat had been vacant since the death of Yadav’s father Mundrika Singh Yadav in October 2017.
The BJP and the JD (U) are alliance partners.
With inputs from PTI