While the Central ruling BJP had been celebrating what it claimed as a remarkable victory in the Hyderabad civic polls, the celebrations were indefinitely cut short by the shocking news that came from its stronghold state of Uttar Pradesh as the Samajwadi party had applied brakes for the celebrations of the Central ruling party after defeating the saffron camp not somewhere across the country but at the heart of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's constituency. 

The party, which revamped by Amit Shah's formula of taking every election serious with the view of achieving his goal of sweeping every level of governance from Panchayats to Parliament, had taken back a  major debacle from Varanasi after its rival had swept the Legislative Council seats in Modi's own Parliamentary constituency. For the party which relished the victory from the Hyderabad civic polls, the defeat from the Prime Minister's constituency had come as a huge setback. 

Uttar Pradesh is one of the six states in India with a bicameral legislature, with two houses - the Vidhan Sabha or the Legislative Assembly and the Vidhan Parishad or the Legislative Council. The state legislative council has a hundred members. The election for eleven Legislative council seats- five seats of the graduates and six seats in the teachers' constituency was held on December 1. The term of these eleven seats had expired on May 6 but the elections got deferred owing to the COVID-19 outbreak. 

The results were announced now and both the seats in Varanasi- one reserved for teachers and the other for graduates- were won by the Samajwadi Party candidates. According to reports, Samajwadi Party's Ashutosh Sinha won the Varanasi Graduates' seat while his party colleague Lal Bihari Yadav had won the teachers' constituency. Though the election had held for 11 seats, the results were declared for nine seats of which BJP had won four seats, Samajwadi party had won three seats, and the independent candidates had won two seats. 

In the elections for Graduates' constituencies, the Samajwadi Party, and state ruling BJP had won two seats each while the counting of votes was underway on one seat. The reports say that BJP candidates Manvendra Pratap Singh had won the Agra Division Graduates' seat and Dinesh Goyal won the Meerut Graduates' seat. While the former state ruling Samajwadi Party had defeated BJP in Varanasi and Allahabad-Jhansi seats, BJP in return had defeated Samajwadi in Agra seat.

On Friday, the results for six teachers' constituency seats were declared of which three were taken by the BJP, one by the Samajwadi Party, and two by independents. BJP's Umesh Dwivedi, Shrishchandra Sharma, and Hari Singh Dhillon were declared winners from Lucknow, Meerut, and Bareilly-Moradabad teachers' constituencies respectively and SP candidate Lal Bihari Yadav had won Varanasi teachers' constituency by defeating BJP. 

The Agra and the Faizabad teachers' constituencies were won by independents Akash Agarwal and Dhruv Kumar Tripathi respectively.  The term of office of these MLCs had expired on May 6 and earlier during the polls, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav had issued a statement in which he alleged that the BJP had attacked the policemen in Jhansi after the party had feared defeat and Yadav had further urged the immediate arrest of the culprits. Polling for eleven seats was held on last Tuesday and the BJP, Congress, Samajwadi Party, and the teachers' association had contested the polls with a total number of 199 candidates in the race.