Purvanchal, or eastern Uttar Pradesh, has emerged as an intriguing three-way electoral pie – Narendra Modi’s stronghold in and around Varanasi, Yogi Adityanath’s stronghold in the Gorakhpur region and Akhilesh Yadav’s fort in Azamgarh.
The geographical division throws a saffron wave in both the upper and lower parts of the Purvanchal and a red wave in the middle. This also means that the Bharatiya Janata Party lost 25 out of 26 seats in the four districts of eastern UP in the February-March assembly elections through which the Yogi government’s showpiece Purvanchal Expressway project passes – Ambedkar Nagar, Azamgarh, Mau, and Ghazipur. In all these the Samajwadi Party has won.
Purvanchal is also the area where SP has made maximum lead in this election. While the coalition led by him won only 13 out of 107 seats in 18 districts of eastern UP in 2017, this time it won 42. The BJP alliance won 80 out of these 107 seats in the last elections and has been reduced to 63 seats this time. Time. The Bahujan Samaj Party has been wiped out despite winning four Lok Sabha seats in Eastern UP in 2019.
Yogi Belt
The BJP won all 26 seats in eastern UP’s Gorakhpur, Deoria, Kushinagar and Sant Kabir Nagar districts and seven out of 10 seats in Siddharthnagar and Maharajganj districts. It is the stronghold of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath who was earlier MP from Gorakhpur and is now MLA from Gorakhpur Sadar. The total number of seats won by the BJP-led alliance in the upper reaches of Purvanchal was one more (33) than in 2017, indicating Yogi’s total dominance here.
In this area too, BJP’s ally Nishad Party was the major winner.
Akhilesh’s stronghold
It was in the Middle Purvanchal with 47 seats that the SP’s alliance with the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) really worked. The SP-led block won all 22 seats in Azamgarh, Ambedkar Nagar and Ghazipur districts and 16 out of 25 in Mau, Ballia, Basti and Jaunpur districts. The seats won by the SP’s alliance in Middle Purvanchal went up from just 11 to 38 seats in 2017. The BJP won 26 seats in the region in 2017 but fell to just eight this time.
The biggest loser was the BSP which won four Lok Sabha seats here in 2019 – Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Lalganj and Ghosi – but was reduced to just one assembly seat this time. This indicates that Mayawati’s party won these parliamentary constituencies in 2019 on the basis of SP’s support.
Modi’s Fort
The 24-seat Lower Purvanchal remains a BJP bastion and is the fort of Varanasi MP and PM Narendra Modi. The BJP-led alliance this time won 22 of these seats, all constituencies in Varanasi, Mirzapur, Sonbhadra and Varanasi districts, and five out of seven in Sant Ravidas Nagar and Chandauli. Overall it was the same performance as 2017.
The Samajwadi Party could win only two seats in Lower Purvanchal.
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