A commanding win for Congress
What happened
Uttar Pradesh's assembly election produced a comfortable single-party majority.
The Indian National Congress won 269 of the 425 seats, a landslide by any reasonable measure.
That gave it 56 seats beyond what a bare majority required.
The Lok Dal finished a distant second with 84 seats.
What changed
The state's main opposition this time had never before won seats in Uttar Pradesh in the numbers it did here.
The LKD entered the assembly with 84 seats, immediately becoming the second-largest party in the house.
This election also had 1 unopposed return — a seat where only one candidate stood, so no vote was needed to decide it.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from the results stand on their own.
Chhibramau, Uttar Pradesh was the closest result of the election, decided by a margin of just 36 votes — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second.
Amethi, Uttar Pradesh saw the most one-sided result of the election, with the winner ahead by 97.0% of the vote — and the same constituency also posted the election's highest turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — at 78.5%.
Govind Nagar, Uttar Pradesh was the largest constituency by registered voters, with 2,13,858 electors on its rolls.
Allahabad North, Uttar Pradesh drew the largest field of the election, with 35 candidates on the ballot.
The backdrop
Uttar Pradesh had cycled through several different ruling parties in the years since the Emergency.
Held in June 1977, shortly after the national Emergency ended, this assembly election saw the newly formed Janata Party win 352 of Uttar Pradesh's 425 seats. The Indian National Congress, which had won every UP assembly election since the state's first in 1951, fell to 47 seats and lost power for the first time since independence.