The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday won 10 of the 11 municipal seats in the urban local body elections in Uttarakhand. State Election Commissioner Sushil Kumar said the ruling BJP won 10 mayoral seats, while an independent candidate won the Srinagar mayor seat in Pauri district. The counting of votes, which began on Saturday, is still going on and the results of all 100 urban local bodies held on January 23 are likely to be out by afternoon. Voting was held on Thursday for 11 municipal corporations, 43 municipal councils and 46 nagar panchayats. The PTI report said that 65.4 percent voters exercised their franchise in the elections.
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A total of 5,405 candidates were in the fray, including 72 for 11 mayor posts, 445 for Municipal Council President and 4,888 for Municipal Councilors and members. Mayor seats won by BJP include Dehradun (Saurabh Thapliyal), Rishikesh (Shambhu Paswan), Kashipur (Deepak Bali), Haridwar (Kiran Jaisdal), Roorkee (Anita Devi), Kotdwar (Shailendra Rawat), Rudrapur (Vikas Sharma), Almora. (Ajay Verma), Pithoragarh (Kalpana Devlal), and Haldwani (Gajraj Bisht).
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The Congress, which had won two mayor seats in the last urban local body elections held in 2018, did not get any seats this time. Even in municipal councils, it stood third after BJP and independents. Ahead of the urban local body elections, the BJP had sought votes in the name of a triple engine government to keep the pace of development in the state “uninterrupted”.
