Lok Sabha elections 2019: Yogi Adityanath confident his work will stand party in good stead
Despite constant attacks from the opposition, Adityanath appears confident about his ‘work for people’ and has predicted the BJP will win 74 Lok Sabha seats.
The stakes are high for chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who completes two years in office on Tuesday, as the BJP banks on the performance of his government in addition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s work, in the Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh which elects 80 members of the lower house of parliament.
Despite constant attacks from the opposition, Adityanath appears confident about his ‘work for people’ and has predicted the BJP will win 74 Lok Sabha seats. The BJP won 71 seats in UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Its ally Apna Dal bagged two seats.
Asked about the reason for the chief minister’s confidence, UP BJP general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak said, “Uttar Pradesh has a double engine government. The BJP has a government both at the Centre and in the state. This makes our delivery rate better. The people are realising that our claims are credible and on the basis of this realization, we are confident of winning 74 Lok Sabha seats.”
Yogi, who was busy trying to get many important projects going before announcement of polls, will present his report card at the state BJP headquarters here on Tuesday.
Those familiar with the BJP government’s functioning in state claim that Yogi has many firsts to his credit.
“As chief minister, Yogi has visited Noida many times and broken the jinx that kept his predecessors away from there,” said a government functionary working closely with him.
“The Yogi regime has provided 2.5 lakh government jobs to youth and has been able to attract investment of Rs 87,000 crore in two years against the Rs 57,000 crore and the Rs 55,000 crore invested during the five year tenures of the BSP and the SP governments respectively,” he said.
The BJP’s losses in the by-elections to Gorakhpur, Phulpur and Kairana Lok Sabha seats last year became a cause for concern for the party. Adityanath had blamed overconfidence for the losses in Gorakhpur. It was his Lok Sabha seat before he assumed office as chief minister.
Similar was the case with Phulpur, which was deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya’s Lok Sabha seat. The SP-BSP alliance, which worked for these three seats, poses a great challenge to the BJP in the 2019 polls too.
The Congress that won only two Uttar Pradesh seats (Amethi and Rae Bareli) in 2014 is also working on tie-ups with small parties and is stepping up attacks on both Modi and Yogi governments.
A Samajwadi Party spokesman said the Yogi government had nothing to show on its report card of two years.
Nevertheless, Adityanath has asserted that the BJP will win Gorakhpur, Kairana, Amethi and Azamgarh Lok Sabha seats.
