Most of the political parties had placed their bets on these "tested leaders" with an eye on winning the maximum number of seats in the politically-crucial state.
As many as 31 members of the Uttar Pradesh assembly tried their luck in the Lok Sabha elections from the state, which sends 80 representatives to the Lok Sabha.
Of them, the Samajwadi Party had fielded the maximum number of 17 legislators followed by the Bahujan Samaj Party and Bharatiya Janata Party which fielded seven and five legislators respectively. The Congress had fielded two of its sitting members of the legislative assembly.
Except for the Congress, whose MLAs Pradeep Jain Aditya and RPN Singh won from Jhansi and Kushinagar seats respectively, legislators of other parties did not fare well.
Of the 17 MLA fielded by the SP only three won, while of the seven MLAs fielded by the BSP only two won. From the BJP only one MLA could secure a berth in Parliament.
From the SP, except for party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav (Mainpuri), Ram Kishen Yadav (Chandauli) and Mithilesh Kumar (Shahjahanpur), none of the legislators won.
Prominent losers from the SP included former assembly speaker Mata Prasad Pandey and Ajay Rai, who had switched his loyalty from the BJP to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi, Iqbal Mahmood from Sambhal, Mehboob Ali from Amroha, Shahid Manzoor from Meerut and Bhagwat Charan Gangwar from Bareilly.
Others in the list of SP losers were Dharmendra Kashyap from Aonla, Riyaz Ahmad from Pilibhit, Deepak Kumar from Unnao, Ashok Singh Chandel from Hamirpur, Shabbir Ahmad from Bahraich, Raj Kishore Singh from Basti, Brahma Shanker Tripathi from Kushinagar and Durga Prasad Yadav from Azamgargh.
Of the seven MLAs fielded by the ruling BSP, except Qadir Rana (Muzaffarnagar) and Dhananjay Singh (Jaunpur), others lost the elections. The BSP MLAs who lost include Shyam Sunder Sharma (Mathura), controversial MLA DP Yadav (Badaun), Gauri Shankar (Etawah), Mukhtar Ansari (Varanasi) and Rajiv Trehan alias Rajiv Chanana (Moradabad).
In the BJP camp too the success rate of MLAs was meagre, where except for Lalji Tandon (Lucknow), who contested the elections in the name of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, others like Lallu Singh (Faizabad), Ram Naresh Rawat (Barabanki), Krishna Raj (Shahjahanpur) and Hukum Singh (Kairana) lost the elections.
