Akhilesh Yadav Says “We Showed That BJP’s Seat Count Can Be Decreased”

A day after the BJP’s record victory in Uttar Pradesh, prime challenger Samajwadi Party’s chief Akhilesh Yadav thanked voters for their support and said they had shown that the BJP’s seat count can be decreased.

Taking to Twitter this morning, Mr Yadav said he was grateful to the voters of the state for a two-and-a-half fold increase in their seat tally and a one-and-a-half fold surge in their vote share.

“We have shown that the BJP’s seat count can be decreased. This decline would continue. More than half of falsehoods have been wiped out, the rest will follow. The struggle in public interest would continue,” he said in his first public reaction after the results were declared yesterday.

The BJP and its allies won a total of 273 out of the 403 seats in the politically significant state. This was a drop of 49 seats from the party’s tally in the 2017 elections when it unseated the Samajwadi Party government.

The Akhilesh Yadav-led party won 111 seats on its own and the alliance led by it posted victory in 125 constituencies. This was a jump of 73 from its show in the 2017 election. This was also the Samajwadi Party’s best performance ever.

The run up to the high-voltage election saw Mr Yadav travel across the length and breadth of the country’s largest state to reach out to voters and seek their support. This time, he had not forged an alliance with the Congress, as in the 2017 election, or the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party, as in the 2019 election — both alliances had seen little success electorally.

As the results revealed, the Samajwadi Party was able to consolidate a major chunk of anti-BJP votes, but failed to come anywhere close to the BJP’s massive mandate.

In terms of vote share, the Samajwadi Party managed to get 32 per cent votes against the BJP’s 41 per cent.