The BJP’s Ashok Kumar Tiwari won the Varanasi mayor’s seat defeating his Samajwadi Party rival Om Prakash Singh by a margin on 1,33,137 votes. While Tiwari bagged 2,91,852 votes, Singh got 1,58,715 votes.
Ashok Kumar Tiwari is reportedly the regional secretary of Kashi region. The ruling BJP swept the mayoral elections in Uttar Pradesh winning the posts in all the 17 municipal corporations on Saturday.
Chief minister Yogi Adityanath thanked the people of Uttar Pradesh and congratulated BJP workers for forming a “triple-engine government” in the state after the party’s “biggest victory” in the urban local body polls.
The party’s candidates also won in Lucknow, Ayodhya, Jhansi, Bareilly, Mathura-Vrindavan, Moradabad, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Aligarh, Shahjahanpur, Ghaziabad, Agra, Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Firozabad and Meerut.
The urban local body polls were held in two phases — on May 4 and May 11 — to elect 17 mayors and 1,401 corporators. Nineteen corporators were elected unopposed, according to the State Election Commission.
Of the 17 municipal corporations, the BJP repeated its candidates only in Kanpur City, Bareilly and Moradabad and all three emerged victorious.
Adityanath said the win was a result of better coordination between the government and the organisation.
Flanked by Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak at a press conference at the BJP headquarters here, Adityanath said the BJP has won all the 17 municipal corporations for the first time.
( With PTI inputs)
