UP, Bihar bypoll results: BJP trails in Adityanath's Gorakhpur, other key seats

Gorakhpur/Patna: Counting of votes for bypolls to three Lok Sabha seats -- Phulpur and Gorakpur in Uttar Pradesh and Araria in Bihar – is underway. Counting is also going on for two Assembly seats – Bhabua and Jehanabad from Bihar. Giving a tough fight to Uttar Pradesh's ruling BJP, SP's Praveen Kumar Nishad  is leading in the Gorakhpur constituency with 89,950 votes after six rounds of counting.

BJP's Upendra Dutt Shukla is second with 82,811 votes in a constituency known as the bastion of state's Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. In Phulpur, SP's Pratap Singh Patel is leading by 15,713 with 122,247 votes, while BJP's Kaushlendra Singh Patel is trailing with 106,534 votes after eleven rounds of counting. However, Uttar Pradesh Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya exuded confidence and said that the BJP would taste victory with a comfortable margin of a lakh votes in Gorakhpur and Phulpur. In Bihar, the BJP is leading with 58,225 votes in the Araria Lok Sabha constituency followed by RJD with 55,334 votes.

After eighth round of counting, BJP is leading in Bhabua with 19,738 votes and RJD is leading in Jehanabad after tenth round of counting with 29,551 votes. The results are expected to be declared by afternoon.

Byelections in Uttar Pradesh, necessitated after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya vacated their seats in Gorakhpur and Phulpur constituency, respectively, on taking office, are being seen as a prestige battle for the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). It will also test the recently formed electoral arrangement between the two arch-rivals -- Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP). The two parties have come together in Phulpur and Gorakhpur for the first time after 1991 to take on the BJP. Termed by Adityanath a “rehearsal” for the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the byelections are witnessing a triangular contest involving the ruling BJP, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress.

In Uttar Pradesh, the BSP is supporting the SP candidates in the two Lok Sabha seats while Congress, which contested the 2017 assembly poll with Samajwadi Party, had fielded its own candidates. For the BJP, the election is a prestige issue for chief minister Yogi Adityanath who represented the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat five times in a row till he took over as chief minister in 2017. Phulpur, a seat earlier represented by former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was won for the first time by the BJP in 2014 when Keshav Prasad Maurya, a former mayor of Varanasi, won the seat with a margin of 3.76 lakh votes. In Bihar's Araria, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress are pitted against the BJP-Janata Dal (United) alliance and it’s the first big test for Nitish Kumar after he walked out of the Grand Alliance last year to team up with the BJP. Bihar bypolls are being seen as a litmus test for Chief Minister Nitish Kumar after he pulled out of the state's Grand Alliance and joined the BJP.