With the Samajwadi Party crossing the halfway majority mark in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the state is now set for Samajwadi president Mulayam Singh Yadav to be sworn is as the 32nd chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The Samajwadi Party has won 224 seats in the 403-member state Assembly, which is way ahead of the halfway mark.
The SP has convened a meeting of its parliamentary board here on Wednesday and this will be followed by a meeting of the newly-elected legislators who will formally elect Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav as their leader.
Party sources said that the party would stake its claim to form the next government in Uttar Pradesh and the swearing in would take place possibly after Holi.
Till late in the evening, there was no news about UP chief minister Mayawati conceding defeat and submitting her resignation to the governor. Mediapersons waited for several hours outside Raj Bhavan but there was no sign of the chief minister coming to meet the governor.
The chief minister turned incommunicado and there was no word from the party headquarters — not even the customary reaction to the poll results.
For the BSP, the elections have come as a major setback and the party has lost as swiftly as it rode to power in 2007. The BSP could win merely 79 seats and most of its ministers, including Lalji Varma, Choudhury Laxmi Narain, Nakul Dubey and Vinod Singh, have lost the elections.
The Congress also received a setback since the party’s performance was far below expectations. The party that hoped to cross 100 seats, ended up with merely 28 seats.
In Rae Bareli, the constituency of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the Congress lost four seats to the Samajwadi Party and one to the Peace Party.
In Amethi, which is Mr Rahul Gandhi’s constituency, the Congress could win only the Tiloi and Jagdishpur seats while it lost the remaining three to the Samajwadi Party.
The BJP performance in these elections can easily be termed dismal. The party was a major loser and ended up with 49 seats — two less than its 2007 tally of 51 seats.
For Kalyan Singh, the elections have brought rather bad news. His Jan Kranti Party could not win even a single seat and his son Rajvir lost the Dibai seat while daughter-in-law Premlata was defeated in her Atrauli seat.
Former SP leader Amar Singh has also been rejected by the people of UP and his much-publicised Rashtriya Lok Manch could not win even a single seat in these elections.
The Peace Party, that claimed to emerge as a kingmaker in the elections, could manage to win only four seats while the RLD had to remain content with nine seats, one less that it got in 2007.