The results for those legislative council elections are mostly in, and it’s been quite a mixed bag across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Voting happened on 23 October for 28 seats – teachers’ and graduates’ constituencies – and counting wrapped up over the last couple of days. People used paper ballots this time, which some opposition parties had been pushing for.
Overall, the BJP and its NDA partners walked away with 16 seats. That’s a solid showing for them. Congress, on the other hand, didn’t manage a single win. Zero. Prime Minister Narendra Modi even posted about it, pointing out the paper ballots and asking how many seats Congress got. Pretty pointed.
In Uttar Pradesh, where 11 seats were up, the Samajwadi Party put in a strong performance with five wins. That includes both seats in Varanasi – teachers’ and graduates’. Lal Bihari Yadav took the teachers’ seat for SP, and Ashutosh Sinha the graduates’ one. Agra teachers’ also went to SP’s Akash Agrawal. BJP still held the edge overall in the state with around six seats. They won places like Meerut-Saharanpur graduates’ (Dinesh Goyal), Meerut teachers’ (Shrichand Sharma), Bareilly-Moradabad teachers’ (Hari Singh Dhillon by a big margin of over 17,000 votes), Lucknow teachers’ (Umesh Dwivedi, who made it a hat-trick), and a couple more. Gorakhpur-Faizabad teachers’ was close but BJP’s Dhruv Tripathi scraped through. These results matter because UP heads into assembly elections next year, so both sides will be reading the tea leaves here.
Karnataka was the clearest story. The ruling Congress got completely blanked on all four seats. BJP took three – North-East teachers’ (Shashil G Namoshi), West graduates’ (S V Sankanur), and South-East graduates’ (K M Suresh). Their ally JD(S) grabbed the Bengaluru teachers’ seat with A P Ranganath, beating a sitting Congress MLC. Clean sweep for the NDA alliance. Local BJP voices said it showed anger over the state government’s performance, corruption talk and unfulfilled promises. For Congress in Karnataka, this is a real slap.
Bihar had eight seats and a more scattered result. BJP got three, including Tirhut teachers’. JD(U) took one, RJD one (Patna teachers’ went to Dr Sanjeev Singh). Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party opened its account with a win in Darbhanga teachers’ – Dr Suresh Rai beat a sitting Congress MLC by a few hundred votes. Two independents also won, one in Saran teachers’. A few sitting MLCs lost their seats, so some turnover there.
Maharashtra’s five seats were tighter and showed some cracks inside the ruling Mahayuti alliance. They and the opposition MVA each ended up with two confirmed wins. BJP’s Kaustubh Gawade took Pune teachers’, and Shiv Sena’s Kiran Sarnaik held Amravati teachers’. On the other side, NCP (SP) candidates won Pune graduates’ (Harshada Deshmukh-Jadhav) and Aurangabad graduates’ (Pratapsinh Patil, who unseated a three-term MLC). The Nagpur graduates’ seat was still going down to the wire late into the night, with BJP’s Sudhakar Kohale and Congress’s sitting MLC Abhijeet Wanjari trading leads for ages. Counting went past 40 hours in places. Congress was claiming it, but it hadn’t been officially declared when the main reports came out. Seat-sharing disagreements inside Mahayuti apparently left openings that the opposition exploited.
Across the board, five sitting MLCs lost their seats, and independents plus newer outfits like Jan Suraaj made some noise. Turnout had been decent on polling day – higher among teachers than graduates.
These aren’t the big assembly polls, of course, but they give a sense of the mood among educated voters and teachers in these states. In UP the SP’s Varanasi wins will give them a boost to talk about. Karnataka’s clean sweep against Congress will be used by the BJP-JD(S) side. Bihar showed a more fragmented picture, and Maharashtra highlighted alliance management issues.
That’s the picture as the last counts filtered in. Local dynamics mattered a lot – personal networks among teachers and graduates often decide these more than national slogans.
Sources:
ABP Live / PTI report, 28 October 2026
Economic Times, 29 October 2026
Times of India (Maharashtra coverage), 29 October 2026
India Today, 28 October 2026
Hindustan Times live updates, 28 October 2026
TV9 Hindi, 28-29 October 2026
@Rohit Manral