Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday, 10 March, won his maiden Assembly election from Gorakhpur Urban constituency by 62,057 votes.
Adityanath (with 1,20,610 votes) was up against Samajwadi Party's (SP's) Sabhawati Shukla (47,232 votes), Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP's) Khwaja Shamsuddin (6,367 votes), Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan (6,139 votes), and Congress' Chetna Pandey (1,942 votes).
Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is looking at a resounding victory in UP, which will make it the first party to retain power for two consecutive terms in the state. It has won 42 of the 403 seats, and is leading in 207. However, the party's apparent tally of 249 is lower than the historic win of 325 seats in 2017.
With just 3.31 percent of the votes, lawyer and Dalit-Bahujan rights activist Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan failed to deliver in Gorakhpur Urban, where a large number of voters belong to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
Unlike 2017 when the BJP relied heavily on PM Narendra Modi's popularity before the elections and declared Adityanath as the CM only after the results were declared, the party this time has officially led the campaign with Adityanath as the CM face.
Since 1998, Yogi Adityanath had served in the Lok Sabha from the Gorakhpur seat in Uttar Pradesh for six consecutive terms.
In 2017, the SP led by Akhilesh Yadav, was reduced to a minor presence in the state, obtaining only 47 seats out of a total of 403. While Mayawati's BSP won only 19 seats, the Congress had won seven.
The exit polls had predicted that BJP could secure around 46 percent of the votes, which is higher than its previous record of 41.4 percent (with alliance) votes in 2017, but significantly lower than the 51.2 percent votes it had secured in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)