Mumbai: The Maha Vikas Aghadi – the alliance which formed just over a year ago – has outperformed the Bharatiya Janata Party by winning four of the six seats of the Maharashtra Legislative Council. While BJP managed a lone seat, the sixth seat went to an independent candidate. Of the tri-party alliance, the Shiv Sena, however, lost its lone candidate in Amravati.

The election results come as a major setback for the BJP which has been trying every trick in the book to dislodge the coalition government and claim power in the state. The graduate constituencies – considered an impregnable BJP bastion, and particularly, the Nagpur, Pune and Aurangabad seats where the party is the strongest – were breached by the MVA coalition of the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress.

The election was conducted on December 1 and the results were declared today, December 4.

The MVA considers its success in Nagpur most crucial with the Congress candidate Abhijit Vanjari polling an impressive 55,947 votes of a total of 1.33 lakh votes. BJP’s Sandeep Joshi lost with a large margin of over 15,000 votes. Similarly, the NCP’s candidate Arun Lad claimed the Pune seat beating the BJP candidate Sangram Deshmukh with a whopping margin of more than 48,000 votes. The NCP has reclaimed this seat from the BJP after nearly 20 years.

As soon as the results were out, NCP chief Sharad Pawar said this was “people’s verdict” against the BJP. “The results clearly show that Maharashtra has finally rejected the BJP. Our (MVA’s) leadership has been endorsed by Maharashtra’s voters,” he said. He further added that the result is also a reflection of the MVA government’s performance in the last one year.

The BJP, however, did not take the loss well. Maharashtra BJP chief Chandrakant Patil, who along with former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had campaigned extensively in Pune said that the results turned out the way they did because the MVA had decided to contest together. He said the three parties lacked “guts”. “If they had the courage they would have contested separately,” Patil said. He further claimed that today’s result can nowhere be termed the “people’s mandate”.

Fadnavis, however, acknowledged that the results were not as per the party’s expectations. “The results of Maharashtra Legislative Council polls are not as per our expectations. We were expecting more seats but won only one. We miscalculated the combined power of the three parties,” Fadnavis told the news agency.

The Maharashtra legislative council, commonly known as the state’s Upper House, has 78 seats in all. In a graduate constituency, the voter must be a graduate from a recognised university and in a teacher constituency, the voter has to be a full-time teacher. A significant 12 lakh graduates and teachers had participated in the polls.