By IANS,
Lucknow : The Samajwadi Party’s rout in the two Lok Sabha and three assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh has given a big blow to party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. The heavy margin of defeat has come as a shock to him.
Though the Samajwadi Party candidates polled a fairly good percentage of votes in four of the five constituencies, they failed to get anywhere close to the winning margins of the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party.
Take the case of Bilgram assembly constituency in Hardoi district where Samajwadi Party nominee Vishram Singh Yadav polled 33 percent votes, yet he lost to BSP’s Rajni Tiwari by a margin of 33,168 votes.
Likewise in Karnailganj assembly (Gonda), Yogesh Pratap Singh of Samajwadi Party bagged 32 percent votes, but lost to Kunwari Brij Singh by a margin of 9,737 votes.
In the assembly seat of Muradnagar (Meerut) the party even lost its deposit and was relegated to the third position with just about 9 percent votes in its kitty. It was Rashtriya Lok Dal nominee Ayub Khan who stood a close second with 38 percent votes against the winner Raj Pal Tyagi, who polled 44 percent votes. Tyagi polled 58,687 votes against Khan’s 51,834.
The prestigious Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat was wrested by BSP’s Akbar Ahmad Dumpy essentially because of the division of the Yadav vote between Samajwadi Party’s Balram Yadav and Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rama Kant Yadav. As against 25 percent votes polled by Balram Yadav and 28 percent by Rama Kant Yadav, the ruling BSP candidate bagged 37 percent votes. As against Dumpy’s tally of 227,340 votes, Rama Kant Yadav got 173,089 votes while Balram Yadav stood a close third with 156,621 votes.
A similar scene was witnessed in Khalilabad parliamentary seat where Bhal Chandra yadav of Samajwadi Party polled 26 percent votes as against 37 percent by Bhishm Shankar Tiwari of the ruling BSP. Significantly, the Congress managed to get 17 percent votes here.
Tiwari, who is the son of underworld don-turned politician Hari Shankar Tiwari, got 218,393 votes while Bhal Chandra Yadav polled 153,761 votes.