2024 Lok Sabha Election Result LIVE: Samajwadi Party Leads INDIA’s Big Charge, Set For Record UP Haul
04.06.2024: In the 2019 Lok Sabha election the BJP got 62 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats and its ally, the Apna Dal (Sonelal) picked up another two, while the Samajwadi Party managed only five and the Congress got just two.
The Samajwadi Party is on course to record its best-ever showing in a Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh. Ex-Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s outfit – which is among those driving the Congress-led INDIA opposition bloc’s surprise challenge to the ruling BJP – was leading in 38 seats at 2 pm.
The SP’s previous best was 36 in 2004 – when the Congress-led UPA won.
In the last Lok Sabha election – in which the BJP got 62 of the state’s 80 seats and its ally, the Apna Dal (Sonelal) picked up another two – the Samajwadi Party managed a return of only five.
Late SP patriarch and ex-Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav was one of the winners.
The party got just five seats in the 2014 election too, down from 23 in the 2009 poll.
Should today’s numbers hold the SP will have done what neither the Congress nor ex-Chief Minister Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, its fierce rival, could do in the past two national or state polls.
It is not, though, a result that has come out of the blue.
In the 2022 Assembly election the BJP was dominant; Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party claimed 255 of the state’s 417 seats. The closest rival, though, was the SP, which won 111 seats.
Mr Yadav’s party’s haul then was a massive 64-seat spike from five years ago and was driven, to a significant extent, by the farmers’ protests that rocked the BJP’s ‘double-engine government’.
That groundswell of support seems to have carried over into this election.
UP has emerged as the big surprise in this election. A poll of exit polls had indicated the BJP would continue its powerhouse showing in the state with 68 seats won by the party and NDA partners.
INDIA was expected to win just 12 seats. In fact, Republic Bharat-Matrize and India Today-Axis My India declared the bloc could manage as little as six seats.
There was, however, one that bucked the prediction trend.
TV5 Telugu said the opposition group would claim a narrow majority with 43 seats.
The Samajwadi Party is contesting as part of the Congress-led INDIA opposition bloc, which was formed in June last year to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.
The SP has fielded 63 candidates and the Congress 17, including in the family bastions of Amethi (which Rahul Gandhi lost to Smriti Irani in 2019) and Raebareli (held by Sonia Gandhi from 2004).