Agency
LUCKNOW: Bharatiya Janata Party made a clean sweep in Uttar Pradesh by winning 14 out of the 16 mayoral seats in the civic polls while Samajwadi Party and Congress could not open their accounts.
After sweeping Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and registering a comprehensive performance in the 2017 assembly elections here, the BJP once again showed why the state is its citadel. Winning 14 of 16 municipal corporations (Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Ghaziabad, Bareilly, Agra, Firozabad, Ayodhya, Mathura, Lucknow, Kanpur, Saharanpur, Jhansi, Bareilly and Moradabad) has once again shown that the voters here continue to back the party.
Of the 198 Nagar Palika Parishad chairman posts, the BJP won 47 seats. Of the 5,261 Nagar Palika member seats, BJP won 624. In the polls for the 438 Nagara Panchayat chairman, the ruling BJP won 81 seats.
PM Narendra Modi said that the outcome of the civic polls was evidence that people believe in the developmental work undertaken by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Even Adityanath said that the outcome should be an eye-opener for rivals.
For Congress, the outcome of the civic polls may well be as big a blow for Congress as it is decisive for BJP. The party has been reduced to being a non-entity in the state where it has been out of power for three decades now. Even though Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi are Lok Sabha MPs from the state, the party has failed to win a significant number of wards in the Nagar Panchayats and Nagar Palikas.