CM Yogi wins prestige battle as BJP wrests Ayodhya’s Milkipur

The BJP on Saturday avenged the Lok Sabha election loss in Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad segment which includes Ayodhya with the party candidate winning the Millkipur Assembly bypoll in the area by a margin of over 60,000 votes.

The win, which found a pride of place in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory speech after the BJP’s Delhi sweep today, reestablished the authority of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath who had been on the mat after a saffron slide in the General Election in UP..

Yogi alone organised and mobilised the BJP campaign in Milkipur, a prestige battle for him and the party.

Today BJP candidate Chandrabhushan Paswan won the seat by a margin of 61,710 votes polling 1,46,397 votes. The fact that he defeated Samajwadi Party’s Ajit Prasad, the son of Awadhesh Prasad who had earlier won against the BJP in the Faizabad parliamentary poll, made the saffron party’s victory sweeter. Prasad got 84,687 votes and Azad Samaj Party’s Santosh Kumar finished third with 5,459 votes.

The victory in Milkipur was being seen as absolutely crucial for the BJP which had endured taunts from the opposition over the loss of the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat which includes Ayodhya. This loss after the consecration of the Ram Temple in January 2024 in Ayodhya had come as a major embarrassment for the party. The win in Milkipur also follows the earlier pattern where the ruling BJP in UP had bagged six of the nine bypolls held in the state last November. That was Yogi’s first battle post the Lok Sabha poll decimation of the BJP in India’s largest state, a development that largely led to the party failing to touch a simple majority on its own in the lower House leading to the dependence on allies. Yogi’s bypoll wins come in the backdrop of his “katenge to batenge” slogan.

In November last, the BJP had won six seats and NDA partner RLD had bagged Meerapur leaving just two (among nine bypoll segments) — Karhal and Sisamau — for the Samajwadi Party which had made massive gains at the saffron party’s cost in the national elections. The BJP had won Kundarki, Ghaziabad, Khair, Phulpur, Katheri and Majhawan bypolls. The Milkipur bypoll was necessitated because sitting MLA Awashesh Prasad had won the Faizabad parliamentary seat and moved to the Lok Sabha.