Yogi Gets In With The Big Boys

The BJP’s performance in the civic polls gives Adityanath the stretch room to follow his own development agenda

- Ashish Misra

December 1, the day poll results for Uttar Pradesh’s 652 urban local bodies were declared, was one of those rare occasions when Yogi Adityanath did not venture out of his 5, Kalidas Marg residence in Lucknow. Not till after 3 p.m., that is, when the BJP was officially declared winner in 14 of the 16 big city municipal corporations. Only then did the chief minister emerge to celebrate the victory with other party leaders.

Riding piggyback on a campaign in which Adityanath crisscrossed the state addressing more than 30 public meetings, the BJP won all the four new corporations— Ayodhya, Saharanpur, Firozabad and Mathura—besides existing older corporations in Lucknow, Varanasi, Allahabad, Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Agra, Bareilly, Ghaziabad, Moradabad and Jhansi. The BJP’s Rishikesh Upadhyay trounced the SP’s Gulshan Bindu in Ayodhya’s first mayoral poll. Significantly, though, the BSP succeeded in wresting Meerut and Aligarh, two critical western UP corporations earlier held by the BJP.