The headlines on the day of the civic poll results in Uttar Pradesh may have suggested a sweep for the ruling BJP , but that's just the elections for mayors in the state's biggest cities, where it won 14 of the 16 up for grabs. An analysis of the polls for the heads of the next tier of cities - the nagar palika parishad presidents - shows that it not only won just 35 per cent of the seats, it got a mere 28.6 per cent of the votes. Considering it had polled over 42 per cent in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and close to that figure in the 2017 assembly polls, this is not great news for the BJP. But its main rivals in the state have little reason to cheer, having performed even worse.The BJP's vote share in the mayoral contests for the municipal corporations was 41.4 per cent, while the three other major parties - SP, BSP and Congress - were left far behind in the 15 to 18 per cent range. In the nagar palika parishad presidents' polls, however, the saffron party could win only roughly one in three seats or 70 of the 198 in the contest, with independents making major inroads. It's vote share of 28.6 per cent was still comfortably ahead of the SP's 21.7 per cent but the gap was nothing like in the mayoral contests. A regional analysis of the nagar palika parishad presidents' contests throws up more pointers to the challenges for the BJP in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. In two regions that between themselves accounted for 90 of the 98 seats - Central UP and Rohilkhand - the SP actually won more seats than BJP and in Central UP even had a higher vote share. Both in 2014 and in the assembly polls, the saffron party had led comfortably in each region of the state.The party's vote share is uniformly lower in every single region of the state, but the pick-up in the vote share of its rivals is patchy, the SP putting up a strong fight in two regions but having sub-20 per cent vote shares in western UP, the northeastern districts and Bundelkhand. BSP seems to have held its own in the southeastern districts and in the west, but yielded the main opposition space to SP in the rest. The Congress' showing in these lower tiers belies any hopes of revival it might have got from the mayoral polls.Also worrying for BJP would be the fact that its share of seats – and, we can be sure, of votes – goes down as the level of the contest dips from the biggest cities to the smaller ones to the bottom of the urban ladder, the nagar panchayats. In the nagar panchayats, BJP won only 100 of the 438 presidents' posts, independents picking up 182. While we have not calculated vote shares for this tier, it is certain that the party's share would be even lower than in the nagar palika parishad presidential polls. BJP's share of seats in the members of the two lower tiers, nagar palika parishad and nagar panchayats, is even less than in the heads of these bodies. Only one in eight elected nagar panchayats members and about one in six nagar palika parishad members is from the party.