Bypoll results: RJD wins Araria; BJP loses two seats in Uttar Pradesh

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday lost two key parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh, Gorakhpur and Phulpur, which were vacated by Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya after their entry into the Assembly in April, 2017.nnSamajwadi Party’s Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel won Phulpur Lok Sabha seat by 59,613 votes with help of and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).nnPhulpur was won in 2014 by Keshav Prasad Maurya under whose leadership the BJP went to polls in the last Lok Sabha. He had won it by over three lakh votes in 2014.nnPhulpur, once represented by the country?s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, witnessed a saffron surge in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and Maurya won there.nnOn the other hand, Praveen Kumar Nishad won from Gorakhpur, beating BJP’s Upendra Dutt Shukla by 21,881 votes.nnWith the two defeats in Uttar Pradesh and one in Bihar today, four years later, it is down to 275, which includes the speaker. This is just a couple above the magical 272, not achieved by any other political parties since 1984 in Lok Sabha.nnThe third Lok Sabha seat that went to polls was Araria in Bihar which was retained by Lalu Prasad Yadav?s Rashtriya Janata Dal. RJD?s Sarfaraz Alam won the Araria Lok Sabha seat by 61,988 votes. Alam got 5,09,334 votes while the BJP candidate got 4,47,346.nnTwo Assembly seats in Bihar also went to polls. The BJP won Bhabua, while the RJD got Jehanabad.nnGorakhpur has been held by Yogi Adityanath since 1998 ? he was the youngest MP at 26 ? and three times before that by his mentor Avaidyanath.nnPhulpur is an extremely prominent Lok Sabha seat that the BJP had wrested only in 2014. It has been represented thrice by Jawaharlal Nehru, his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit and also former Prime Minister V P Singh.nnSince there are no permanent enemies in politics, the election results will also test how far the loose alliance between the two arch-rivals — Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party ? can go bedfore the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.nnThe last time they joined hands was in 1993 — to stop the BJP from coming to power gain after Kalyan Singh?s government was sacked in the aftermath of the Babri demolition.nn