The Bharatiya Janata Party suffered a serious setback in the heartland on Wednesday, losing all three parliamentary bypolls in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. With this, the BJP was down to 274 seats in Lok Sabha from its 2014 score of 282.In the last few months, the BJP has lost five bypolls across UP, Bihar, and Rajasthan. Four of these were seats that it had won in 2014.Of these, the two most embarrassing defeats came on Wednesday when both UP CM Yogi Adityanath and deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya failed to ensure victories in Gorakhpur and Phulpur, the constituencies they had vacated in 2017.Gorakhpur, in particular, was a major loss of face for Adityanath, a five-time MP, who has been winning the constituency since 1998. “This loss is a result of us not understanding the political negotiation between SP and BSP and over-confidence,” said the UP CM, who had campaigned extensively in his stronghold.The political arithmetic after the new understanding between SP and BSP proved unbeatable, indicating that such an alliance in 2019 Lok Sabha polls could pose a formidable challenge to the BJP.In Bihar, the re-stitched alliance between BJP and Nitish Kumar’s JDU failed to make impact in Araria Lok Sabha seat, despite the Bihar CM campaigning there. His rival Lalu Prasad’s RJD won comfortably by 61,988 votes riding on his traditional Muslim-Yadav vote base. BJPJDU had won this seat in 2009.Besides this, RJD also retained the Jehanabad assembly seat where Kumar had put up a JDU candidate. BJP retained the Bhabua assembly seat, its only consolation win in this round of bypolls. Maurya conceded to ET that BJP did not expect that BSP would be able to “so smoothly transfer its votes to SP”. He said the BJP was “not prepared” for such an alliance which took it by surprise in just the past 10 days.“We will prepare a new strategy for 2019,” he added. A senior SP functionary, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the party had made good use of two Adityanath statements. “He termed the SP-BSP understanding as one of Saanp aur Nevla (Snake and Mongoose). Our workers went door-to-door telling voters that Yogi had called Yadavs a snake and Dalits a mongoose. Also, Yogi had said he was a Hindu and hence did not celebrate Eid. This further consolidated Muslim votes behind us,” a senior SP functionary told ET.The Samajwadi Party, however, conceded that Mayawati deserved a big share of the credit for ensuring that BSP votes transferred to the SP. “I want to express my greatest gratitude to Mayawati Ji,” said Akhilesh Yadav after the results.He later drove down to Mayawati's residence to express his gratitude. According to SP leaders, Yadav and Mayawati may meet soon to discuss a possible alliance for 2019 polls.However, the BJP still feels that bypolls for a few seats is quite different to stitching an alliance. “We are not sure if BSP and SP can thrash out a seat-sharing understanding…and then there is the Congress too which is still not part of the alliance,” a UP BJP leader said.While Yadav refused to speculate on this, senior SP functionaries said they were confident of working out an amicable arrangement. They were, however, clear that if the Congress wanted to be part of the possible alliance, then only the two seats of Amethi and Raebareli could be left for them.BJP was, however, less worried about the Bihar results, saying Araria and Jehanabad were sitting RJD seats and the equation there was in RJD’s favour. Yet, the result did put a question mark on Nitish Kumar’s ability to tilt some minority votes to the alliance.