The Uttar Pradesh Assembly election was preceded by life-and-death issues that were expected to have a bearing on the way the stakeholders in a democracy used the most potent weapon in their arsenal: their votes.

As it turned out, several of these issues do not appear to have had any decisive impact on the outcome of the election.

Covid second wave

The chilling sight of bodies floating down the Ganga became the overriding image of the Covid second wave that devastated many families in the country. The horror was captured by the Gujarati poem, Shav Vahini Ganga (Ganges, the Hearse of Corpses), by Parul Khakhar.

Many of the pictures were said to have been taken from the banks between Allahabad and Varanasi during the second wave of the pandemic.

But the issue did not harm the BJP in the election. The ruling party won all the three seats of Allahabad City and eight out of 12 in the district. Four seats have gone to the Samajwadi Party. The BJP has also retained all the eight seats in Varanasi.

Lakhimpur Kheri

The BJP bagged all eight seats of Lakhimpur Kheri, where Ashis Mishra, the son of Union minister Ajay Mishra Teni, was accused of mowing down four farmers and a journalist on October 3, 2021.

The clean sweep nailed the notion that the people would punish the BJP for going out of its way to stand by Teni. In Nighasan, under which falls the Tikunia curve where the killings took place, the BJP’s Shashank Verma defeated the SP’s R.K. Kushwaha by a margin of 42,000 votes.

Farmers’ movement

The agitation proved to be an exception somewhat and seemed to have helped the Samajwadi Party-Rashtriya Lok Dal alliance to some extent in western Uttar Pradesh.

Out of the six seats in Muzaffaragar, the home district of farm leader Rakesh Tikait, the BJP could win only two — Sadar and Khatauli. The SP-RLD alliance won Meerapur, Budhana, Charthawal and Purkaji. Last time, the BJP had won all six seats.

In the adjoining Shamli district, all the three seats — Kairana, Thana Bhawan and Shamli — went to the SP-RLD. Mriganka Singh, daughter of the late Hukum Singh, and Suresh Rana, the sugarcane minister in the Yogi Adityanath government, lost from Kairana and Thana Bhawan. The BJP in 2017 had two seats in Shamli.

Hukum had handed to the BJP a potential issue of forced migration of Hindu traders because of Muslim criminals in 2016. The then MP of Kairana, Hukum had presented a list of about 400 traders in Parliament. The list was eventually dismissed by the then SP government. But it was made an issue by Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and Adityanath in their speeches in the region.

Out of three Assembly seats in Baghpat district, the SP-RLD won Chaprauli while the BJP got Sadar and Badaut. Earlier too, the BJP had two.

The SP has won 42 out of 136 Assembly seats of western UP this time. It had only seven in 2017. The BJP has got 76 this time while the remaining are with other parties.