Six sitting Lok Sabha MPs of the Bharatiya Janata Party were denied tickets in Uttar Pradesh by the party for the upcoming parliamentary election. Four of them are Dalits and two others belong to the Other Backward Classes. Their names did not figure in the first list of candidates released by the BJP for the Lok Sabha polls.

Those who failed to get the BJP’s re-nomination are the sitting MPs from Agra, Hardoi, Misrikh, Shahjahanpur, Fatehpur Sikri and Sambhal. According to people familiar with the developments, three of the six MPs who have been denied tickets are in touch with either the alliance or the Congress.

UP cabinet minister SP Singh Baghel will contest from Agra, where the party replaced its sitting MP Ram Shankar Katheria, who has already been appointed the chairman of the SC/ST Commission. “I am grateful to the party and will ensure that we win Agra yet again,” Baghel said.

In Hardoi, the party has replaced sitting MP Anshul Verma with six-time former MP Jai Prakash Rawat. In adjoining Misrikh seat, the party replaced sitting MP Anju Bala with two-time former MP Ashok Rawat whose previous wins had come on BSP ticket.

“It was ‘Naresh factor’ at work in Hardoi and Misrikh seats,” a local BJP leader said on phone from Hardoi referring to the clout that former Samajwadi Party heavyweight Naresh Agarwal, who is now in BJP, wields in the region.

“No alliance factor here. We will have a comfortable win,” BJP’s candidate from Hardoi Jai Prakash Rawat said.

The First List

The BJP released a list of 182 nominees for the Lok Sabha polls on Thursday including 28 from Uttar Pradesh, where the party had won 71 seats in 2014.

It expectedly announced the names of its star campaigner and Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Varanasi in the first list along with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who would re-contest from Lucknow.

However, the BJP chose to hold back the name of candidate for Kanpur seat, currently held by veteran BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi.

The BJP also did not announce the candidate for Kairana Lok Sabha seat that goes to polls in the first phase on April 11. Kairana, Gorakhpur and Phulpur were the three Lok Sabha seats that the BJP lost to the SP-BSP-RLD alliance in the 2018 Lok Sabha by-polls.

Kairana, Gorakhpur and Phulpur

While Kairana Lok Sabha seat fell vacant following the death of sitting BJP MP Hukum Singh, the Gorakhpur and Phulpur seats were vacated by Yogi Adityanath and Keshav Prasad Maurya after they took over as UP chief minister and deputy chief minister, respectively.

“Discussions were held on Kairana seat. The candidate will be announced soon,” a BJP leader said. In Kairana, the Samajwadi Party (SP) has fielded sitting MP Tabassum Hasan, who had defeated BJP candidate Mriganka Singh (daughter of Hukum Singh) in the 2018 Lok Sabha by-election.

In Muzaffarnagar, BJP’s Sanjeev Balyan will take on Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president Ajit Singh, who is looking to recreate the Jat-Muslim vote bank in the region that got split after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, altering voting pattern to BJP’s advantage.

Another BJP leader said, “The impact of the anti-BJP alliance was clear in the first list. The party is aware that the Jatav-Yadav vote bank would be difficult to crack. The party has started eyeing non-Yadav, non-Jatav votes again as is evident from the changes that it made in Badaun and Agra.”

Fight For Amethi

The SP-BSP-RLD alliance has set aside Rae Bareli and Amethi seats for United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi but the BJP is engaged in a psychological play by declaring Union minister Smriti Irani as its candidate against Rahul Gandhi from Amethi.

Uttar Pradesh BJP leader Chandramohan said, “The Congress chief has been supported by the SP-BSP-RLD alliance but by declaring Amethi in the first list, the party has shown its confidence and bared its intent of winning a seat from where generations of Nehru-Gandhi family have been elected.”

Smriti Irani is expected in Amethi in the next couple of days to campaign even as the BJP will launches a formal campaign from March 24 with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath visiting Saharanpur for a public meeting.

Caste Consideration

With the other party veteran Kalraj Mishra, the MP from Deoria ruling himself out, the buzz is that the party may replace its Brahmin leadership with new faces in a state bitterly divided on caste lines.

Uttar Pradesh Deputy CM Swami Prasad Maurya, who before joining the BJP was the OBC face of BSP, has ensured Lok Sabha ticket for his daughter Sanghamitra Maurya from Badaun.

Party insiders admit that Sanghamitra has a tough battle ahead as she will face Dharmendra Yadav, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance candidate. Yadav is the cousin of Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav.

Despite the fact that five of the six assembly segments under Badaun Lok Sabha seat are represented by the BJP, at least three party lawmakers had written to the BJP leadership in April 2018 about the popularity of Dharmendra Yadav in the region.

The BJP has also replaced union minister Krishna Raj with Arun Sagar in Shahjahanpur, Chaudhary Babulal with Raj Kumar Chaher in Fatehpur Sikri and Parmeshwar Lal Saini in Sambhal.

First Published: Mar 22, 2019 00:06 IST