Forty-eight-year-old Archana Verma won the maiden mayoral election to Shahjahanpur Municipal Corporation on Saturday, defeating Nikhat Iqbal of the Congress by a margin of more than 30,000 votes.
Shahjahanpur was made a municipal corporation in 2018, a year after the last urban local body elections were held in the state. This time, the seat was reserved for a woman candidate from Other Backward Classes.
According to the State Election Commission (SEC), Verma got 80,762 votes (49.5 per cent) and Iqbal 50,484 votes (30.94 per cent).
Mala Rathora of the Samajwadi Party polled 20,155 votes (12.35 per cent).
The Samajwadi Party had initially declared Verma as its mayoral candidate but she later joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.
In all, eight candidates were in the fray. The vote share of None Of The Above(NOTA) stood at 0.82 per cent.
Shahjahanpur is a key urban local body and three ministers in the Uttar Pradesh government were elected to the state's bicameral legislature from here -- Finance and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Suresh Khanna, PWD Minister Jitin Prasada and MoS (Independent Charge) Co-operative Department JPS Rathore.
Earlier, Verma, when asked why she left the SP after being declared its mayoral candidate, had told PTI, "People in the SP had formed factions and they were hatching a conspiracy to defeat me."
