The counting of votes for 11 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council seats entered a crucial stage on Tuesday, with results beginning to expose a mixed picture for the BJP. The most notable result came from Varanasi, where Samajwadi Party candidate Lal Bihari Yadav defeated BJP’s Dr Pramod Kumar Mishra in the teachers’ constituency.At Varanasi, counting began at 8 am at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Navin Mandi complex in Paharia. The process began with sorting the ballot papers and preparing bundles before the votes were taken up district-wise. By 7 pm, the counting of the actual votes was still under way.By 10 pm, after two rounds, Yadav had secured 10,958 votes against Mishra’s 6,060. The figures indicated Yadav’s victory and marked a setback for the BJP in the teachers’ seat in Varanasi.The result came as counting continued simultaneously at seven centres in Lucknow, Varanasi, Agra, Meerut, Jhansi, Bareilly and Gorakhpur. The elections cover 11 seats, for which voting was held on October 23. A total of 152 candidates are in the contest, with 14.81 lakh voters deciding their fate. Overall polling stood at 55 per cent.The results emerging from different centres, however, do not point in one direction. In Agra, BJP candidate Dr Manvendra Pratap Singh won the graduates’ seat for the second time.In Lucknow, BJP candidate Umesh Dwivedi also secured a significant result, defeating SP candidate Sushil Kumar by 4,818 votes in the Lucknow teachers’ constituency. Dwivedi’s victory marked his third consecutive win from the seat.The contest remained unsettled in other constituencies as counting moved into later rounds. In Jhansi, SP candidate Dr Mansingh Yadav was leading by 18,639 votes after the seventh round in the Allahabad-Jhansi graduates’ constituency, with 84,052 ballot papers counted so far.The Gorakhpur-Faizabad teachers’ constituency remained particularly fluid because of the second-preference vote count. Nine candidates had been eliminated, while counting of the remaining ballots continued. BJP candidate Dhruv Tripathi’s lead had narrowed from 512 votes to 447, with five more candidates still to be eliminated and around 15,700 ballot papers left to be examined.At the Gorakhpur centre, the fourth round had recorded 40,811 valid votes and 2,800 invalid votes, taking the total votes examined to 43,611.Counting was conducted under tight security, with CCTV cameras and videography used to monitor the process. In Jhansi, the route from Chitra Chauraha to Bundelkhand Degree College was closed as a security measure around the counting venue.With several constituencies still in the counting process, Tuesday’s results offered a picture of a contest where the BJP secured important wins but also suffered a significant loss in Varanasi, while the final outcome in several seats remained dependent on further rounds and preference votes.