The Lok Sabha polls results are out but the election season is far from over in Uttar Pradesh as 11 of its MLAs making it to the Lok Sabha will lead to bypolls on assembly seats falling vacant.
Of the 13 MLAs, who were in the fray, 11 have won the polls.
The legislators who contested the Lok Sabha polls included nine BJP MLAs, with four of them being state ministers, two Samajwadi Party members and one each from the BSP and the Apna Dal.
The section 151 A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 stipulates that a bye-election has to be held within six months of a seat falling vacant in an assembly or Lok Sabha.
Of the four ministers, except Mukut Bihari Verma, who lost from Ambedkar Nagar, three others won the poll.
They included Rita Bahuguna Joshi from Allahabad, Satyadev Pachauri from Kanpur and SP Singh Baghel from Agra.
Among the BJP legislators, RK Singh Patel won the Banda Lok Sabha seat. He is a legislator from Manikpur assembly seat in the same parliamentary constituency.
Similarly, BJP MLA from Iglas, Rajvir Singh Valmiki Diler won the Hathras Lok Sabha seat and party legislator from Jaidpur, Upendra Rawat won from Barabanki.
BJP legislator from Gangoh, Pradeep Chaudhary won the Kairana Lok Sabha seat, while another legislator from Balha assembly seat, Akshaywar Lal Gaud won from Bahraich.
Samajwadi Party had fielded its Rampur MLA Mohammad Azam Khan from the Lok Sabha seat of the same name. Khan was defeated by actor Jaya Prada of the BJP.
BSP MLA Ritesh Pandey and Apna Dal MLA Sangam Lal Gupta, who contested on BJP tickets also won from the Ambedkar Nagar and Pratapgarh seats respectively.
The MLAs who lost included SP legislator from Jaswant Nagar, Shivpal Singh Yadav, who had floated his own political outfit Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party Lohia, following family feud and had contested for the Firozabad seat.
Shivpal Yadav secured over 91,000 votes, failing to win the seat but causing a severe dent in the vote share of his nephew and SP candidate Akshay Yadav, who lost the election to the BJP candidate by a slender margin of over 28,000 votes.
With three Cabinet colleagues of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath making it to the Lok Sabha, a Cabinet rejig is also on the cards. For the new vacancies in the state Cabinet, some "devoted" leaders have already begun vying on basis of their "hard work" during the polls.
"All ministers and MLAs were assigned duty by the BJP in specific areas and seats. Rejig could see clipping of wings of some of the ministers and rewarding some others of them," a senior BJP leader said.
With the next target set as 2022 state assembly polls, the BJP will be leaving no chance to balance the caste and region representation in the Adityanath Cabinet.
The Party has already elevated the status of party minister Anil Rajbhar to counter the fallout of the exit of Om Prakash Rajbhar of Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party from the alliance.
Anil Rajbhar has been given all the departments Om Prakash Rajbhar was heading in a bid to project the former as a true and more effective "Rajbhar leader".
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