Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya has conceded that the Samajwadi Party won seats it was not expected to win, as he reacted to the results of the biennial Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council elections, in which the BJP suffered a notable defeat in Varanasi, the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
"SP won where it should not have. We will introspect," Maurya said in Lucknow on Tuesday, as the results of the elections to the state's Upper House began to settle. "We were expecting to win even more seats but we did not win those many. We will look into this. We will make efforts to ensure that the BJP wins once again in the forthcoming elections."
The elections covered 11 seats of the Legislative Council, five from graduates' constituencies and six from teachers' constituencies, with 152 candidates in the fray. Turnout stood at 55.24 per cent among 14,81,310 eligible voters, an electorate made up entirely of graduates and teachers rather than the general public. That narrow, educated franchise is precisely what made the Varanasi result sting for the BJP.
In Varanasi, the Samajwadi Party's candidate Lal Bihari Yadav won the teachers' seat. The result carries heavy symbolic weight: Varanasi is the Lok Sabha seat Modi has won three times, in 2014, 2019 and 2024, and it is the city most closely associated with his political identity.
For the SP to take the teachers' constituency there, in an election decided by the city's educators, was read across the state as a moral setback for the ruling party, whatever the overall arithmetic of the council polls.
The wider picture was more mixed. The BJP won six of the 11 seats, with five declared and one lead, while the Samajwadi Party secured five, with three declared and two leads, according to early tallies reported by news agency ANI. As counting progressed, other reports put the BJP on four retained seats and the SP on two confirmed wins, with counting still continuing for five constituencies on Wednesday.
The SP also won the Agra teachers' seat, while the BJP retained both Meerut constituencies and the teachers' seats in Bareilly-Moradabad and Lucknow. The SP was also leading in three graduates' seats, including Lucknow.
Maurya's admission was striking for its candour. "BJP has repeated its previous performance," he said, framing the outcome as a holding operation rather than an advance. The party, he added, would review its shortcomings and work to improve its performance in forthcoming elections. His remark that the SP had "opened its account where it was not expected" was seized on immediately by the opposition.
Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav lost no time in pressing home the advantage. In a post on social media, he said the BJP's workers were "secretly happy" about the victory of his party's PDA alliance, adding that "no one becomes a stranger just by leaving home". He went further, declaring that "the MLC elections have packed off the BJP bag and baggage" and that "despite extreme dishonesty and administrative tampering, no one could avert the BJP's downfall".
Akhilesh also trained his fire on the Gorakhpur seat, the bastion of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, where the BJP candidate Dhruv Tripathi won by a narrow margin of 307 votes after counting that stretched beyond 32 hours for fewer than 30,000 votes cast. "If the scheming BJP folks hadn't pulled that double-cross in Gorakhpur, the same fate as in Banaras would have befallen them there too," Akhilesh wrote. "All in all, the BJP has suffered a moral defeat in Gorakhpur as well."
The SP chief also alleged that the Election Commission was refusing to issue a certificate of victory for the Varanasi teachers' seat despite the result being in his party's favour. "The results are ready, but the certificate isn't being issued. The Election Commission has one last chance to prove its impartiality; otherwise, it should resign because it has failed in conducting the vote count," he wrote.
He further alleged that "all those corrupt officials who served the BJP will be hauled before the people's court once the PDA government takes power."
The counting process itself was not without drama. BJP workers staged a dharna and scuffled with security personnel at a counting centre, alleging manipulation by officials sympathetic to the SP. In Gorakhpur, the SP boycotted the counting over alleged irregularities, while a clash between BJP and SP supporters disrupted proceedings in Agra.
The allegations and counter-allegations have ensured that the council results will be argued over long after the final numbers are declared.
The political significance of the results extends beyond Uttar Pradesh. In Karnataka, the ruling Congress lost all four seats it contested in its own biennial Legislative Council elections, a setback on ground closely tied to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge's home turf of Kalaburagi. Taken together, the results in the two states handed both national parties reasons for embarrassment in constituencies associated with their top leadership.
For the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, the Varanasi defeat is uncomfortable precisely because the teachers' and graduates' constituencies are decided by what Maurya himself described as "a franchise of very capable and educated people". Losing among teachers in the Prime Minister's own city, in an election where the party machinery is usually at its most organised, raises questions the party leadership will want answered before the next assembly elections.
For the SP, the result is a morale booster and a talking point, even if the overall council arithmetic still favours the BJP. Winning Varanasi, holding Agra and leading in graduates' seats gives Akhilesh Yadav a narrative of momentum, and he has moved quickly to frame the outcome as evidence of a shifting mood among the state's educated voters.
Maurya's promise of introspection suggests the BJP is taking that narrative seriously. The party will review where its organisation fell short, why its candidates underperformed in seats it expected to win, and how it can recover ground among graduates and teachers before the next electoral test. In Uttar Pradesh, where every election is fought as a semi-final for the one that follows, even a council poll can set the terms of the argument for months to come.
(Reporting based on India Today, NDTV and Outlook.)