This announcement by Samajwadi Party comes amid the offer of 17 Lok Sabha seats to Congress.
Lucknow:
Samajwadi Party on Monday announced 11 more candidates from Uttar Pradesh for the upcoming general elections, including don-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari’s brother and BSP MP Afzal Ansari.
On January 30, SP announced its first list of candidates for 16 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.
The party’s announcement on Monday comes amid India Bloc’s alliance partner Congress being offered 17 Lok Sabha seats. Overall, there are 80 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state.
Afzal Ansari, who is the sitting BSP MP from Ghazipur parliamentary constituency, has been fielded by SP from the same seat.
The Supreme Court had conditionally suspended Ansari’s sentence in the 2007 Gangsters Act case in December 2023, saying his constituency would be deprived of its legitimate representation in the legislature because of the by-elections given the remaining term of the current Lok Sabha. Cannot be done.
The other candidates announced by the party on Monday are Harendra Malik (Muzaffarnagar), Neeraj Maurya (Aonla), Rajesh Kashyap (Shahjahanpur-SC), Usha Verma (Hardoi-SC), RK Chaudhary (Mohanlalganj-SC), SP Singh Patel ( Pratapgarh), Ramesh Gautam (Bahraich-SC), Shreya Verma (Gonda), Virendra Singh (Chandauli) and Rampal Rajvanshi (Misrikh-SC).
Of the 11, four are from backward community, five are from Scheduled Caste category, Virendra Singh is Thakur, while Afzal Ansari is Muslim.
Samajwadi Party is facing criticism from party leaders and alliance partners for not giving tickets to PDA (Backward, Dalit, Minority) candidates for the ongoing Rajya Sabha elections.
For the Rajya Sabha, voting for which will be held on February 27, the SP has fielded two Kayasthas – cinestar Jaya Bachchan and former UP chief secretary Alok Ranjan and Ramji Lal Suman, a Dalit.
Asked whether its list for the Lok Sabha elections is a damage control exercise, SP spokesperson Rajpal Kashyap told PTI, “This list has all the elements of ‘PDA’ embedded in it. And it is not a damage control exercise.” ” “The party’s previous list also had all the elements of PDA. Now, those who are raising questions have some vested interests,” he said. The SP on Monday offered 17 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh to the Congress, with the condition that its chief Akhilesh Yadav would attend the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Rae Bareli only if the offer was accepted.
“We have made a final offer of 17 Lok Sabha seats to the Congress. Akhilesh Yadav’s participation in the Nyaya Yatra in Rae Bareli on Tuesday will depend on his acceptance,” SP chief spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary told PTI.
However, he refused to tell which seats have been offered to Congress.
The SP had earlier offered 11 seats to the grand old party – an offer which it rejected with a demand for higher allocation.
Congress’s Uttar Pradesh unit chief Ajay Rai had earlier said that the party should get about two dozen seats which it had won in the 2009 general elections.
The party’s first list includes the names of Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav and two other leaders of the Yadav family – Akshay Yadav and Dharmendra Yadav.
SP has also named Awadhesh Prasad as its candidate from Faizabad constituency, which covers Ayodhya district.
Currently, nine-time MLA Awadhesh Prasad represents Milkipur assembly constituency in the UP Assembly.
Sitting MP Dimple Yadav has been fielded from Mainpuri, while five-time party MP Shafiqur Rahman Barke will contest from Sambhal.
Ravidas Mehrotra, the sitting MLA from Lucknow Central, has been made the party’s candidate from Lucknow Lok Sabha seat.
Akshay Yadav, son of senior SP leader Ramgopal Yadav, has been named party’s candidate from Firozabad, while Dharmendra Yadav fielded from Budaun.
Dharmendra Yadav is the son of Abhay Ram Yadav, younger brother of SP founder late Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Dimple Yadav, a three-time MP, had won the by-election from Mainpuri seat after the death of Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Dharmendra Yadav was elected MP from Mainpuri for the first time in the 2004 by-election. He represented Badaun in the Lok Sabha in 2009 and 2014.
In 2019, he lost the seat to BJP’s Sanghamitra Maurya.
Akshay Yadav was elected to the Lok Sabha from Firozabad in 2014. In 2019, he was defeated by BJP’s Chandra Sen Jadon.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
