Lucknow: In a closely fought contest, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party ended the Legislative Council elections with a 6-5 scoreline for 11 seats in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday. Results for all six Teachers’ constituencies and four of five Graduates’ constituencies had been declared by late Wednesday. The SP candidate had an unassailable lead in the Varanasi Graduates’ constituency. The party also retained the Teachers’ seat of the district.Of the six Teachers’ seats, BJP won four while the SP secured two. In the Graduates’ constituencies, BJP has won two seats and the SP three. BJP has retained five out of the six seats it had won in 2020, lost one and gained one seat. SP, on the other hand, retained its tally of three seats of 2020 and gained two new seats.Of the 11 seats, six — Lucknow Graduates’, Lucknow Teachers’, Meerut Graduates’, Meerut Teachers’, Agra Graduates’ and Bareilly-Moradabad Teachers’ — were held by BJP in 2020. The SP candidates won three seats: Allahabad-Jhansi Graduates’, Varanasi Graduates and Varanasi Teachers. Independent MLCs Dhruv Tripathi and Akash Agarwal won the remaining two seats — Teachers’ seats in Gorakhpur-Faizabad and Agra.However, Tripathi later joined the BJP, while Agarwal joined the SP just before the poll and entered the 2026 electoral contest as the party’s official candidate.This time, Tripathi won the closest contest of these polls in the Gorakhpur-Faizabad Teachers’ constituency, defeating Independent candidate Rajiv Yadav by a narrow margin of 307 votes. Tripathi secured 16,790 votes, with the outcome decided after counting of second-preference votes. This was his fourth consecutive win. He had won as an independent on the previous three occasions.Following his victory, Tripathi acknowledged the tough competition posed by his rival and praised Rajiv Yadav for putting up a strong fight and winning the confidence of teachers.He said victory and defeat are part of the electoral process, but ultimately a win remains a win. In the Agra-Aligarh Teachers’ constituency, SP candidate Akash Agrawal defeated BJP’s Hari Kishore Tiwari by a margin of 4,263 votes.SP’s Kanti Singh avenged her defeat against BJP’s Avnish Kumar Singh, winning the seat by a margin of 17,225 votes. Kanti received 56,905 votes, while BJP’s Avnish secured 39,778 votes. Kanti had won the seat as an independent in 2014 but lost to Avnish in 2020.In the Varanasi Graduates’ constituency, SP’s Ashutosh Sinha took a decisive lead over BJP’s Kedar Nath Singh as the final preferential vote rounds concluded. After the fourth round of voting, Sinha secured 22,599 preferential votes against Singh’s 15,404 votes, opening up a commanding lead of 7,195 votes.In the Meerut Graduates’ constituency, BJP candidate Dinesh Kumar Goyal emerged victorious by approximately 13,000 votes against SP’s Paremendra Singh, while party colleague Manvendra Pratap Singh won the Agra Graduates’ seat against SP’s Shashank Yadav by a margin of 8,856 votes. BJP had won both the seats in 2020.SP retained the Allahabad-Jhansi Graduates’ constituency, where Maan Singh Yadav defeated BJP’s Ashok Kumar Rathaur by a margin of 27,663 votes.Among the Teachers’ constituencies, BJP candidate Umesh Dwivedi won the Lucknow seat defeating SP’s Sushil Kumar by 4,808 votes, while SP candidate Lal Bihari Yadav retained Varanasi, overwhelming BJP’s Pramod Mishra by 4,898 votes.The BJP retained its hold over the Meerut and Bareilly-Moradabad Teachers’ constituencies. Shrichand Sharma won the Meerut seat against SP’s Nitin Tomar by 13,241 votes, while Hari Singh Dhillon retained the Bareilly-Moradabad seat, defeating SP’s Danish Akhtar by 17,676 votes.
