BJP goes full throttle in SP fortresses: Deputes 6 MPs, 24 MLAs to conquer Azamgarh

LUCKNOW: Battlelines have been drawn in Azamgarh and Rampur where bypolls are due on Thursday.
Azamgarh and Rampur parliamentary seats, vacated by Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and senior party leader Azam Khan respectively, are expected to see an intense poll battle that could potentially determine political course of the BJP and the opposition led by the SP in the run-up to 2024 Lok Sabha elections when Prime Minister Narendra Modi would seek the third consecutive term.
As campaigning on the two seats came to a close on Tuesday evening, it is learnt that the BJP roped in a battery of senior party functionaries to carry out booth-level campaigning in the two parliamentary seats touted as the SP bastion. The BJP has sharpened its focus on Azamgarh where it pressed in six MPs, 24 MLAs besides a host of party workers from surrounding districts to campaign for party candidate Dinesh Lal Nirahua who is facing SP’s Dharmendra Yadav and BSP’s Shah Alam aka Guddu Jamali at the hustings.
This was besides BJP’s move to deploy senior UP ministers, including Arvind Kumar Sharma, Surya Pratap Shahi, Anil Rajbhar, Daya Shankar Singh and Danish Azad Ansari, to oversee campaigning at the booth and division-level. All these ministers have a base in the politically crucial east UP districts of Ghazipur, Ballia, Deoria and Varanasi. A team of party workers led by Gorakhpur region president Dharmendra Singh, too, has been working overtime to drum up support for the BJP in Azamgarh.
“The party has pumped in its maximum possible strength. We all worked at the grass-root level. Let’s hope for the best result,” Azamgarh district president Dhruv Singh told TOI.
While SP chief Akhilesh Yadav did not campaign in Azamgarh, he managed to rope in his party’s key Muslim face Azam Khan to campaign. The SP’s ally SBSP chief Om Prakash Rajbhar had been camping in Azamgarh. Former UP minister Swami Prasad Maurya, who rebelled against the BJP and joined the SP, was also stationed in Azamgarh.
Experts said that the SP may have been facing extraneous political pressure even as Mayawati fielded Jamali, who could potentially cut into Muslim vote bank which reportedly stood steadfastly with the SP during the recently concluded UP polls. The recent announcement of support for Jamali by Aamir Rashadi Madni led Rashtriya Ulama Council (RUC) could further test Muslim consolidation in favour of the Akhilesh Yadav led outfit.