Varanasi: Samajwadi Party candidate for the Majhwan assembly seat, Jyoti Bind, and Bahujan Samaj Party's Deepak Tiwari filed their nominations for the by-election at the Mirzapur district headquarters on Thursday.
After the end of nomination hours on Thursday, returning oficer Gulab Chandra said that a total of four candidates, including those from the SP and BSP, had filed their papers.On Wednesday, five candidates had already submitted their nominations, taking the total tally to nine so far.
Bharatiya Janata Party candidate and former MLA, Suchismita Maurya, is scheduled to file her papers on the final day of nominations, i.e., Friday.
BJP Kashi region unit president Dilip Singh Patel mentioned that party MP from Bhadohi, Vinod Kumar Bind, along with several UP ministers and alliance leaders, including Anil Rajbhar, Ashish Patel, and Ramkesh Nishad, would accompany Maurya to the district headquarters to file her nomination. He denied that the party would stage any show of strength on this occasion.
The BJP has chosen Maurya, who became active in electoral politics after the death of her father-in-law, Ramchandra Maurya, a prominent figure in the eastern UP region.
She won the Majhwan seat in the 2017 assembly election. However, in 2022, the BJP ceded the Majhwan seat to its alliance partner, the Nishad Party, which fielded Vinod Kumar Bind, who later vacated the seat after winning the Bhadohi parliamentary election on a BJP ticket.
SP's pick or the seat Jyoti Bind is the daughter of former MP Ramesh Chand Bind. Chand, a three-time BSP MLA from Majhwan between 2007 and 2017, switched to the BJP to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, winning the Bhadohi seat. However, in 2024, he ran for the Lok Sabha on an SP ticket and lost to BJP alliance partner Apna Dal (S) leader Anupriya Patel in the Mirzapur constituency.
The nomination process for the seat will conclude on Friday.
The scrutiny of nominations will take place on October 28, followed by the withdrawal of nominations and the final list of candidates on October 30, 2024. Voting is scheduled for November 13, with the counting of votes on November 23.
The electorate includes 211,105 male voters, 188,136 female voters, and 18 third-gender voters, totaling 399,259 voters, including 6,175 voters aged 18 to 19. Polling will be conducted at 442 booths across 262 polling centres.