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In the land of Ram, saffron party loses poll
With this victory, the memories of 1989 polls freshened up when Mitrasen Yadav of CPI won the elections amidst the temple movement.
The ‘Ram Mandir wave’ did not favour the Bharatiya Janata Party, as its two-time sitting MP, Lallu Singh, suffered a defeat at the hands of the Samajwadi Party’s Awadhesh Prasad in Faizabad.
A defeat here highlights the success of Samajwadi Party’s new caste calculus as the party’s strategy to field its prominent Dalit leader, Awadhesh Prasad from a non-reserved constituency, delt a humiliating blow to the saffron party.
Prasad bagged 554289 votes against Singh’s 499722 votes and won the seat by a margin of 54567 votes.
With this victory, the memories of 1989 polls freshened up when Mitrasen Yadav of CPI won the elections amidst the temple movement.
Awadhesh Prasad, an old warhorse and MLA from the Milkipur assembly, secured a sensational victory by a significant margin of votes.
Awadhesh Prasad’s political journey began in 1977 when he won his first assembly election from the Sohawal assembly seat in Ayodhya district. Thereafter, he won assembly polls in 1985, 1989, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2007, and 2012.
After losing to the BJP candidate Gorakhnath Baba in the Milkipur assembly poll in 2017, Prasad once again emerged victorious in the 2022 election as the Samajwadi Party candidate from the same seat, defeating the BJP candidate.
The Samajwadi Party’s experiment with a Dalit candidate in a non-reserved seat proved successful, according to Prashant Trivedi, associate professor at the Giri Institute of Development Studies.
After the grand opening of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya by PM Narendra Modi on January 22 this year, the people of Faizabad voted for the first time and rejected the BJP.
The Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency, the geographical centre of Kamandal or temple politics, has consistently witnessed an undercurrent of caste dynamics since the late 1980s.
According to political observers, the BJP’s failure to strike the right Kamandal-Mandal balance was a crucial factor that impacted their chances of victory.
