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Agra to vote for its third woman mayor
The BJP has not lost a single mayoral election in the Taj city since 1989, when its candidate Ramesh Kant Lavania was elected to the post, according to records
The city is set to get its third woman mayor after the ensuing urban local body polls. The Agra mayor seat was reserved for women candidates from the scheduled caste (SC) community in a recently issued notification of the state government.
The previous women mayors were BJP candidates despite the large support base of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which had won six out of nine assembly seats in Agra, often referred to as the ‘Dalit capital’ of Uttar Pradesh, in the 2007 and 2012 elections.
Interestingly, the BJP has not lost a single mayoral election in the Taj city since 1989, when its candidate Ramesh Kant Lavania was elected to the post, according to records.
After the seat was reserved for SC women in 1995, Baby Rani Maurya, a prominent Dalit face of the BJP and now a cabinet minister in the state government, became the first woman mayor of Agra. Her rise to political heights was rapid as she became a member of the state women’s commission and then named the national vice-president of the BJP before being chosen as the governor of Uttarakhand.
After unsuccessfully contesting as the BJP candidate from Etmadpur reserved seat, she won the Agra Rural assembly seat in 2022.
The BJP’s Kishori Lal Mahor won the mayoral election in 2000 when the seat was reserved for SC candidates.
The reservation for SC women in 2006 ensured the victory of the BJP’s Anjula Singh Mahour. She became the second woman to head the city as mayor.
Mahour, who later joined the Samajwadi Party, won the Hathras MLA seat in 2022 on a BJP ticket.
It was in 2012 that Indrajeet Arya, another SC candidate, won the top city post; the ensuing mayoral election in 2017 saw Naveen Jain rise to fame. That year, the mayor seat was kept unreserved.
Even as every party is looking for suitable women candidates for the mayoral post, it remains to be seen if Agra chooses to usher in a new electoral trend or conform to the past political tradition.
“The spread-out opposition, strong communication network of the BJP and propaganda of the double-engine government make the road easy for the BJP. The opposition needs to be united to break the winning streak of the saffron party, which has not only won all mayoral elections in the last three decades but successfully developed women leadership from the schedule caste community,” opined Madhurima Sharma, a retired professor from St Johns College and presently a Pradesh Congress Committee member.
A prominent Dalit activist, Suresh Chand Soni, blamed selection of wrong candidates by other parties as the reason for the success of the BJP.
Pic: Baby Rani Maurya and Anjula Singh Mahour, the first two women mayors of Agra
