BJP Faces The Heat Wave In North India

Compared with 2019, party's score looks set to reduce by 30 in UP, 10 in Rajasthan, five each in Haryana and Bihar, three in Jharkhand, and two in Punjab

- ARCHIS MOHAN

Nearly 50 of the 60 seats the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has either lost or is set to lose from its 2019 tally of 303 are on account of the reverses it has suffered in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Haryana.

Compared with 2019, the party's score looks set to reduce by 30 in UP, 10 in Rajasthan, five each in Haryana and Bihar, three in Jharkhand, and two in Punjab.

In Uttar Pradesh, where the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Congress alliance has won 35 seats of the state's 80 seats and is leading on eight at the time of going to press, the BJP has received a jolt even in Ayodhya, where a grand Ram temple consecration took place barely months ago on January 22.

The SP, which has won 29 and is leading on 8, is likely to become the third-largest party in the Lok Sabha, while the BJP, (28 wins and 5 leads), seems set for its worst performance since 2009, when it had won only 10 seats in the state.

In 2019, the BJP had won 62 of the 80 seats, and ally Apna Dal (Soneylal) had bagged two. Five years earlier, in 2014, it had won 71 and the Apna Dal two. These wins had formed the bedrock of the BJP's successive single-party majority governments at the Centre the first such accomplishment for a party since Indira Gandhi led the Congress to successive Lok Sabha wins in 1967 and 1971.