The Bharatiya Janata Party has passed the semi-final before the finals with flying colours - they retained the 4 states where they ran a government and improved their vote share in Punjab.

Uttar Pradesh however is the big success story - the Yogi Adityanath government is the first since 1985 to beat anti-incumbency - Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party did put in a spirited fight but had to be content with the runners up position. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress have been decimated.

However, 10 cabinet ministers in the Adityanath government including deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya were handed out pink slips. Among the ministers who failed to get the green signal in the saffron wave are sugarcane development minister Suresh Rana, rural development minister Rajendra Pratap Singh and sports minister Upendra Tiwari.

Most of the BJP turncoats who jumped ship and joined other parties before the polls lost - over 50 percent of those who defected to the BJP won.

The BJP also swept all 8 assembly seats in Lakhimpur Keheri, the epicentre of violence in October after four farmers were run over by an SUV allegedly driven by union minister of state Ajay Mishra's son Ashish.

The BJP also won from Hathras, by a margin of over 1 lakh votes - the rape and murder case of a 19 year old dalit girl in September 2020 had catapulted Hathras to national limelight.

Several poster boys of hard-core Hindutva like Keshav Maurya, Suresh Rana, Sangeet Som lost their seats.

To decode the outcome of the assembly elections, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Vishwajit Rane, Cabinet Minister in outgoing Goa government; Amitabh Tiwari, Political Strategist and Sharat Pradhan, Senior Journalist.

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