The Bharatiya Janata Party may have retained the Hamirpur Assembly seat in Bundelkhand, but the poll results have come as a silver lining for the Samajwadi Party as it has nudged ally-turned-bitter rival Bahujan Samaj Party to the third place.
While the SP candidate was the runner-up, losing by 17,000 votes, the BSP came third and Congress fourth in the bypoll.
The BSP, which won more seats than the SP in the Lok Sabha elections, may be claiming to be the main opposition, but the Hamirpur result has raised a hope for the SP.
Even as the BJP won, its vote percentage shrinked as compared to the 2017 Assembly polls and the SP’s vote percentage peaked a little.
In the 2017 Assembly election, BJP’s Ashok Singh Chandel had won the seat by a margin of 8,655 votes. Chandel had polled 44.49 per cent votes while his nearest rival Dr Manoj Kumar Prajapati of SP, had received 24.97 per cent votes and the BSP came third polling 24.29 per cent votes. Chandel was however disqualified from the Assembly after being convicted in a murder case, necessitating the by-election.
The BJP’s vulnerabilities are significantly greater at local level, especially against a potential opposition alliance, but it successfully overcame it in a high-stake election due to the Modi factor.
The Hamirpur Assembly bypoll is a case in point as the party won it with 39 per cent vote share, which is five percent less than the combined vote share of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party.
An alliance of these two regional parties was expected to inflict major losses on the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The idea got a boost from the BJP’s loss in Gorakhpur and Kairana Lok Sabha bypolls in March 2018. But in 2019, the alliance failed to live up to its potential.
The BJP and its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) won 64 seats with 50.7 per cent of total vote in UP, 7.4 per cent  more than what it had polled in 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
The SP-BSP alliance did not survive this debacle and the BSP announced in June this year that it would be contesting the forthcoming bypolls on its own. The result may perhaps trigger a rethink within both parties.