UP Debacle: 29 BJP MPs Lost and 22 Were Re-Elected, Only Two Seats Saw Higher-Than-2019 Victory Margins

With 37 seats, the Samajwadi Party has emerged as the single-largest party in Uttar Pradesh in Lok Sabha elections 2024. The ruling BJP’s tally plummeted significantly to 33 of the 80 seats.

This is the third straight Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh where the performance of the BJP has gone down. In 2014, the BJP got 71 seats with 42.63% vote share. In 2019, even as the party’s vote share improved to 49.98%, the seat count came down to 62. In 2024, the party got 41.37% vote share.

News18 analysed the performance of the BJP across the seats it won this time as well as in 2019.

The party contested on all 80 seats this time and only managed to add Amroha to its winning list – a constituency it had lost in the 2019 polls. BJP’s Kanwar Singh Tanwar defeated sitting MP Kunwar Danish Ali by a margin of 28,670 votes. Ali had defeated Tanwar in 2019 by a margin of 63,248 votes.

Out of the 62 seats the BJP won in 2019, the party has retained 11 where it replaced the sitting MP. In 21 Lok Sabha seats, the sitting BJP MP has won. At least 24 sitting MPs re-fielded by the party in the state have lost the polls. On at least five seats, the party replaced the sitting MP but lost — Allahabad, Badaun, Ballia, Barabanki and Firozabad. While Barabanki and Allahabad voted for the Congress, the remaining three seats elected Samajwadi Party candidates.

WHO ARE THE RE-ELECTED BJP MPs?

Two of the best-performing candidates from the BJP are Gautam Buddha Nagar MP Dr Mahesh Sharma and Agra MP Satyapal Singh Baghel. The two leaders not just retained their seats, but improved their winning margins. From 3.36 lakh margin in 2019, Sharma bagged the seat again with a margin of 5.59 lakh. Similarly, Baghel’s margin has gone up from 2.11 lakh to 2.71 lakh.

All other re-elected BJP MPs have seen a drop in the victory margin. Mathura MP Hema Malini, seeking a third consecutive term from the seat, has seen her victory margin drop by just 64 votes – the lowest drop among re-elected BJP MPs. In 2019, she had won by a margin of 2,93,471 votes and this time the margin was 2,93,407.

Next comes Bulandshahr MP Bhola SIngh who won by a margin of 2.75 lakh votes.

The two MPs with the highest drop in winning margins were Fatehpur Sikri MP Rajkumar Chahar and Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao.

Chahar was elected for the second time from the seat. His winning margin has dropped by more than 11 times – from 4.95 lakh in 2019 to 43,405 this time. Sakshi Maharaj, who bagged the Unnao Lok Sabha seat for a third time since 2014, won this time by a margin of 35,818 – a 3.65 lakh drop from 2019’s 4 lakh-margin.

Two of the BJP MPs won their seats by less than 5,000 votes — Farrukhabad MP Mukesh Rajput (2,678) and Bansgaon MP Kamlesh Paswan (3,150).

The victory margin of Defence Minister and Lucknow MP Rajnath Singh has gone down from 3.47 lakh to 1.35 lakh. Gonda MP Raja Bhaiya won the seat by a margin of 46,224 votes, against 1.66 lakh margin in 2019.

Re-elected for a fourth time from the seat, Domariyaganj MP Jagdambika Pal won by a margin of 42,728 votes, down from 1.05 lakh in 2019.

The New BJP MPs from UP

There are 11 seats where the BJP replaced the sitting MPs but retained the seat. In the list of new MPs, Meerut and Bhadohi were the two seats where the winning margin of the candidates increased over 2019.

The list of 11 new BJP MPs includes actor Arun Govil from Meerut. In Bhadohi, Ramesh Chand was replaced by Vinod Kumar Bind. The winning margin here increased by about 450 votes – from 43,615 to 44,072. Against the margin of 4,729 in Meerut in 2019, the BJP won the seat this time by 10,585 votes.

The list of new MPs also includes Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh’s son Karan Bhushan Singh from Kaiserganj. While Bhushan Sr, the former Wrestling Federation of India chief who was accused of sexual harassment by women wrestlers, won the 2019 polls by a margin of 2.61 lakh votes, Karan Bhushan’s winning margin was 1.48 lakh.

In the Pilibhit Lok Sabha constituency, where the BJP fielded Jitin Prasada, replacing Varun Gandhi, the party won, but the winning margin dropped from 2.55 lakh in 2019 to 1.64 lakh in 2024.

In Deoria and Phulpur seats, the winning margin dropped drastically from 2019. In Phulpur, the winning margin of Praveen Patel was just 4,332 votes.

The Biggest Loss

At least five Union ministers — Kaushal Kishore (Mohanlalganj), Ajay Kumar (Kheri), Sanjeev Kumar Balyan (Muzaffarnagar), Smriti Irani (Amethi) and Dr. Mahendra Nath Pandey (Chandauli) — lost their seats. The SP bagged Muzaffarnagar, Chandauli, Mohanlalganj and Kheri, while Amethi voted for the Congress.

The margins in Kannauj and Amethi were around 1.70 lakh votes, while at least three seats – Dhaurahra, Salempur, and Hamirpur – saw less than 5,000-vote margins.