The results of Uttar Pradesh's Legislative Council polls for five graduates' and six teachers' seats, declared on October 29, held few shocks. Both parties finished roughly where the pre-poll chatter had placed them. The BJP kept its tally of six. The SP grew from three to five. It wrested the Lucknow graduates' seat from the BJP, took the Agra teachers' seat from an independent, and held both Varanasi seats in the Prime Minister's own constituency. The BJP, in turn, captured the Gorakhpur-Faizabad teachers' seat on the CM's home turf.
A Two-Horse Race?
One thing is obvious from these polls: Uttar Pradesh is settling into a straight fight. In ten of the eleven seats, the BJP and the SP finished first and second. In the eleventh, Gorakhpur-Faizabad, an independent pushed the BJP close. The BSP and the Congress did not field candidates at all.
The results also suggest that 2024 was no accident. When the SP-led alliance won 43 of the state's 80 Lok Sabha seats, many in the ruling camp wrote it off as a passing storm: anxiety over the Constitution, tired candidates, a listless cadre. Two years on, the SP's revival looks rooted.
But one thing is obvious from MLC polls: neither BJP nor SP has a clear lead. The fight is still on.
Plus, we should not read too much into these results: Only about 14.8 lakh people were eligible to vote, around one in a hundred of the state's voters. They are a particular kind of voter, too: registered graduates and teachers, largely urban and salaried. No assembly forecast can be built on this. What it can show is the drift of an alert, opinion-forming slice of the electorate, and that slice leaned a little further towards the SP.
Yogi, Still The Trump Card
For the BJP, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath campaigned for the party's candidates in every one of the eleven seats, while the SP relied largely on local leaders. Nearly a decade into the job, the Chief Minister remains the BJP's most recognisable face in the state. His pitch on law and order, welfare delivery, and Hindutva is clear, and no one inside the party comes close to challenging him.
Combine Yogi's appeal with the BJP's election machinery, and we may have a winning formula. BJP seldom loses for lack of effort. No party in India fights elections quite like it: booth committees, panna pramukhs, caste equations reworked seat by seat, and a readiness to change candidates or messaging the moment the ground shifts.
Akhilesh's Two Questions, And Mayawati's Silence
The SP has earned its celebrations, but the real battle begins now. The first is the Congress. The partnership paid off in 2024, when the Congress turned its share of tickets into six seats. Now the bargaining has turned sour. Congress wants well over 150 seats. The SP is said to be weighing an offer of 60 to 70. Posters claiming 200 seats have already caused embarrassment.
Akhilesh Yadav has to decide what the Congress really is for him. It can be an asset that helps consolidate Muslim votes, adds slivers of upper-caste and Dalit support, and lends national weight. Or it can be a drag that is adamant on fighting on seats it cannot win, as happened in Bihar. Akhilesh faces the risk of conceding too much to Congress.
But the most crucial question for SP is: can Akhilesh really expand his PDA coalition? Will Pandits really vote for him? Can he offer enough seats to new PDA constituents to make SP overcome its Yadav-Muslim handicap? It's a tough balancing act.
Then there is the BSP. Mayawati says she will contest alone, has revived talk of Brahmin outreach, and has reviewed preparations across all 75 districts. But a party that won 206 seats in 2007 was reduced to one in 2022, with its vote share below 13%. Sitting out these polls fits a long pattern of absence. If she can stir even part of her Jatav base, she may hurt the SP more than the BJP. If she cannot, the two-horse race only hardens.
Winning Is A Habit
The assembly election is still a few months away. In Uttar Pradesh, that is a long time. Ticket distribution, a seat-sharing spat, a fresh welfare scheme, or a single event or comment can each reset the mood.
Then, SIR is the other unknown factor this time. Will the "vote chori" campaign find resonance at the hustings? Does the SP-Congress alliance end up spending too much energy and time on an issue that may not matter much in the end? We don't know who is likely to benefit from it: the BJP or the SP?
Like sports, winning is a habit in politics, too. Last week, Brazil's Lula da Silva, now 80, trailed in the first round and still won a fourth term in the run-off. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud again emerged as the largest party, and his rivals cannot reach a majority without partners they have so far shunned. Established leaders backed by a disciplined organisation are hard to dislodge.
That is the BJP's edge in Uttar Pradesh. The SP's task is to prove that 2024 marked the beginning of a trend rather than its high point. The council results say it has a case. They do not say it has won it.
(The author is a senior News Editor at NDTV)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
