In the bypolls held subsequently, the BJP managed to wrest Azamgarh and Rampur from the SP. The 14 seats which are not held by the BJP-led NDA include Ghazipur, Lalganj, Nagina, Amroha, Bijnor, Ambedkar Nagar, Saharanpur, Ghosi, Shravasti, Jaunpur, Sambhal, Moradabad, Mainpuri and Rae Bareli.

BJP sources told The Indian Express that a major challenge in these seats has been the selection of candidates as well as the balancing of local caste equations.

To establish a connection with the voters, BJP sources said, the party has undertaken a “sampark abhiyan” (outreach campaign) to target “labharthis” (beneficiaries) of the party-led central and state governments’ schemes in these 14 seats. As part of this exercise, feedback was also sought from the grassroots party workers.

The BJP has also deployed several Union ministers, including Ashwini Vaishnaw, Annapurna Dwivedi and Jitendra Singh, to visit these constituencies and address the situation on the ground.

“We might have lost these 14 seats. However, we have worked hard on finding out the reason for these losses. Union ministers were given responsibilities to connect with workers and scheme beneficiaries,” said BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi. So far, based on feedback from its leaders and workers, the BJP has announced tickets for six of these 14 seats.

In Lalganj, a Scheduled Castes (SC)-reserved seat, the BJP has repeated Neelam Sonkar, who lost to the BSP last time with a margin of 1.61 lakh votes. The party has also managed to get the sitting BSP MP Sangeeta Azad into its fold.

From Jaunpur, where the BSP’s Shivam Singh Yadav won against the BJP’s NP Singh with a margin of 80,000 votes, the BJP has fielded Kripashankar Singh, a former Congress leader and Maharashtra minister. Kripashankar has roots in Jaunpur and the BJP believes he has a support base in the constituency.

The BJP has again fielded Kanwar Singh Tomar from Amroha, which the then BSP candidate Danish Ali had won in 2019 with a margin of 63,000 votes. The party hopes that its alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which has a base in Western UP that the seat falls under, can boost its chances from the seat.

Ali, who had been suspended by the BSP in December last year, joined the Congress on Wednesday. He is now set to contest from Amroha on the Congress ticket, which was allotted the seat by the Samajwadi Party (SP) as part of their seat-sharing pact.

In Ambedkar Nagar, the BJP has got sitting BSP MP Ritesh Pandey on its side now. Pandey, who joined the BJP last month, had won by about 95,000 votes against the BJP’s Mukut Bihar in 2019. He will now contest the election from the seat as the BJP candidate.

In 2019, the BSP’s Ram Shiromani won the Shravasti seat by just 5,320 votes against the BJP’s Daddan Mishra. The BJP has now fielded Saket Mishra from the seat, who had worked in the region as an advisor of the Purvanchal Development Board.

In the Nagina seat, which the BJP had lost to the BSP’s Girish Chandra in 2019 by about 1.66 lakh votes, the party has chosen sitting Nehtaur MLA Om Kumar as its candidate. Bhim Army chief Chandra Shekhar Aazad has expressed his intention to fight the election from this seat. The SP has fielded Manoj Kumar.

The BJP has not declared its candidate from the Congress’s bastion of Raebareli so far. However, it has got some local Congress and SP leaders inducted into its fold.

The BJP’s prospects in these 14 seats have also brightened since the BSP-SP-RLD alliance, which cornered them in 2019, does not exist now. The SP’s new ally Congress does not have a base in most of these seats.