This central zone was a phase that the ruling Samajwadi Party should have swept in alliance with its partner, but 3 big factors seems to have put breaks to Akhilesh Yadav’s development groovy train –
A] Big anti-incumbency against large number of sitting MLAs as most constituencies had seen little development that the CM was making big noise about,
B] The internal feud within the Yadav clan seems to have hurt Akhilesh in some key swing geographies and C] Rahul Gandhi and his Congress party who keep reinventing the art to lose elections. The last factor is quite important and mostly glossed over by the media brigade who do not see beyond Muslim vote consolidation. It is still a mystery as to why Akhilesh agreed to give 12 seats to Congress party in this phase where the grand old party had barely managed to scrape through in just 2 seats in 2012. For instance, SP had conceded 5 of its winning seats of Ghatampur, Bhognipur, Bhagwantnagar, Zaidpur and Sandi to the Congress party despite its extremely poor performance in the past. Today, we can say with some authority that Congress has probably lost each of those seats with big margins!
On the other hand BJP began the day with huge disadvantage of not only past electoral data (of 2012) but by also lagging behind in our pre-poll survey. Yet, the party seems to have done substantially better than most expectations. To be sure, this was not a full Saffron sweep as per our MAPi, but then raw data does not always tell the full picture. After weighted data analysis if BJP holds on to these leads and does much better in other districts where it is in 2nd or 3rd position overall, then it does stand a chance of putting up a phenomenal score of 10x gains as compared to 2012, but even a 6-7x gain (suggested by the MAPi currently) would help the party recover some of the lost ground in West UP (where there was an expectation of a sweep).
BSP is still the dark horse of this UP election and we believe that it is still being classically under-estimated by most poll data because of a silent surge among its core voters and a section of Muslims. Even BJP president, Amit Bhai Shah, seems to have been caught by surprise by Maya’s strength which is why he openly admitted to a “change in the trend” in UP where BSP was earlier written off but had come back into picture suddenly in first phase. Today was a crucial phase for BSP and it seems to have done reasonably well. Especially our final MAPi of the day shows that in Brabanki and Sitapur BSP may have put a strong fight. Fuller analysis of all the reports will give us a clear picture as to whether BJP is now emerging as an outright winner of whether BSP is still putting a brave fight.
