Testing poll waters: 5 MLAs set to try luck at hustings

Lucknow: In keeping with the trend of state legislators taking a plunge into national politics, at least five sitting MLAs will try their luck in the Lok Sabha elections.The most prominent legislator among them is Shivpal Yadav, uncle of Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, who has been given ticket from Badaun. However, the SP is likely to replace Shivpal with his son Aditya Yadav.The other four MLAs are SP’s Zia-ur-Rehman Barq, Chandan Chauhan of RLD and Om Kumar and Atul Garg of the BJP.The pattern draws a close similarity with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when as many as 10 sitting MLAs, including three UP ministers from the Yogi Adityanath cabinet – SP Singh Baghel, Rita Bahuguna Joshi and Satyadev Pachauri – hit the hustings and emerged victorious.Other BJP MLAs who had contested and won the Lok Sabha polls included Pradeep Chaudhary (Gangoh), RK Singh Patel (Manikpur), Rajveer Diler (Hathras), Upendra Rawat (Zaidpur), and Akshaywar Lal Gond (Balha).Senior SP leader and former Rampur MLA Azam Khan had also contested and won the Lok Sabha election in 2019. He later quit the seat to contest 2022 assembly elections from Rampur which he won, though he had to vacate the seat after his conviction in a criminal case.Shivpal, who represents Jaswantnagar seat of Etawah, has been given a ticket from Badaun which is represented by BJP MP Sanghmitra Maurya, daughter of former SP leader Swami Prasad Maurya. The Badaun seat is already in focus after SP and BJP engaged in a war of words following the murder of two boys by a youth.In 2019, Shivpal had contested from Firozabad as a candidate of Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party-Lohia (PSP-L) but lost to BJP’s Chandra Sen Jadon. In the process, Shivpal, who got over 91,000 votes, cut into the vote base of his nephew and SP candidate Akshay Yadav who lost by a margin of around 28700 votes. It was a tumultuous period for SP when Shivpal entered into fractious relations with Akhilesh following a family feud in the Yadav family.The SP’s decision to field Kundarki MLA Zia-ur-Rehman Barq is being perceived as a move to cash in on the sympathy factor. Barq happens to be the grandson of SP’s five-time MP from Sambhal, Shafiq-ur-Rehman Barq, who passed away recently at the age of 91.Likewise, the RLD, an ally of BJP, has fielded its Meerapur MLA Chandan Chauhan, from Bijnor. Hailing from Gurjar community, 34-year-old Chandan comes from a prominent political family. His grandfather Chaudhary Narayan Singh was a deputy CM of Uttar Pradesh in 1977. His father Sanjay Chauhan has also been an MP from Bijnor.The candidature of BJP’s Om Kumar from Nagina has also raised much curiosity. Kumar (54) won from Nehtaur reserved seat in Bijnor in 2022 assembly elections, defeating RLD’s Munshiram by a wafer-thin margin of barely 258 votes. A Jatav, Om Kumar, may lend traction to BJP’s bid for Dalit consolidation even as BSP chief Mayawati is trying to regain her lost ground. The BJP has also replaced its Ghaziabad MP Gen VK Singh with party MLA Atul Garg.SP has also announced the candidature of Bhagwat Saran Gangwar from Pilibhit which is currently represented by BJP’s Varun Gandhi. Gangwar has been a five-time MLA from Nawabganj assembly seat in Bareilly and a former UP minister in the Akhilesh Yadav govt.Experts said that the trend of propping legislators in Lok Sabha elections attains significance even as political parties bank on winnability factor. Sources said that both the BJP and SP could consider more such candidates to contest general elections.