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UP polls: BJP pits Union minister of state SP Singh Baghel against Akhilesh Yadav in Karhal
2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections: This is the second time SP Singh Baghel is contesting against Akhilesh Yadav, the first occasion was the 2009 Lok Sabha election from Firozabad.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has fielded Union minister of state for law and justice SP Singh Baghel against Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav from the Karhal assembly seat, considered to be a stronghold of the Yadav family, for the UP polls.
Karhal, is part of Mainpuri parliamentary constituency. Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav is currently the Lok Sabha MP from Mainpuri.
This is the second time SP Singh Baghel is contesting against Akhilesh Yadav, the first occasion was the 2009 Lok Sabha election from Firozabad. Akhilesh had won then.
Akhilesh Yadav would be SP Singh Baghel’s third poll rival from Mulayam Singh Yadav’s family in the last 13 years. The other two were Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav in the 2009 Firozabad Lok Sabha by-election and Mulayam’s cousin Ram Gopal Yadav’s son Akshay in the 2014 Lok Sabha election from Firozabad. SP Singh Baghel had lost on both occasions.
Karhal will vote on February 20 in the third of the seven-phase UP polls.
SP Singh Baghel was among the three candidates the BJP named for the UP polls on Thursday. The other two being Vinay Shakya from Jaswant Nagar assembly constituency from where Akhilesh Yadav’s uncle Shivpal Yadav is contesting and Manoj Prajapati from Hamirpur. The BJP has so far named 298 candidates in Uttar Pradesh, while its two OBC allies Apna Dal (S) and Nishad Party have named 10 candidates, a majority on the seats that the BJP won in the 2017 UP polls.
“Baghel will win. Akhilesh ji would now do well to ensure that he wins even as many seats as he did in 2017,” said UP’s deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya who, on Monday, was campaigning in Bhogaon, an assembly seat in Mainpuri that the BJP had won in 2017.
SP SIngh Baghel, a former UP Police sub-inspector, was once a security officer of former UP chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav who brought him into politics. His nomination was kept a secret by the BJP and happened soon after Akhilesh filed his papers. Speaking to newspersons after filing his nomination, Baghel, who represents Agra Lok Sabha constituency, said he will give a tough fight to Akhilesh in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Baghel had won Lok Sabha election from Jalesar in 1998, 1999 and 2004 as a Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate.
Jalesar parliamentary seat ceased to exist post delimitation. SP Singh Baghel moved to Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and contested the Firozabad parliamentary seat twice in 2009, once against Akhilesh Yadav (SP) who won but resigned as MP, leading to a by-election.
Akhilesh’s wife Dimple Yadav lost the by-election to Congress candidate Raj Babbar. Baghel, who was also in the fray in the by-poll finished third. He was later made national general secretary of the BSP and sent to the Rajya Sabha by the party.
SP Singh Baghel joined the BJP in 2014 and yet again was chosen to contest against a family member of Mulayam Singh Yadav. This time, he was the BJP candidate against Akshay Yadav. Despite the Modi wave in 2014, SP Singh Baghel lost to Akhshay Yadav.
SP Singh Baghel was elevated as national president of Other Backward Caste (OBC) Morcha of BJP in 2015-16. He contested the assembly election from Tundla (Firozabad) in 2017 and joined the Yogi Adityanath government as a minister.
He was given the BJP ticket for the Agra Lok Sabha seat (reserved) in 2019 and won. He was sworn in as a Union minister of state in 2021.
Earlier, despite having been the BJP’s OBC Morcha chief, he contested the 2017 UP assembly elections from Tundla as a scheduled caste candidate and won. This was objected to by the defeated candidate but the litigation ended with no adverse order against SP Singh Baghel. When asked how he changed his status from an OBC to a Dalit, Baghel had said that he belonged to the Dhangar caste. “That is a subcaste of Gadeerias, who are listed in the OBC list. Between 2012 and 2014, the Dhangars were classified in the scheduled caste list,” he had explained.
Even his supporters in Agra, his Lok Sabha constituency, were surprised when the photographs of SP Singh Baghel, in his early sixties, filing his nomination in the Mainpuri appeared on Monday.
In the early 1990s, Baghel was state president of the Mulayam Youth Brigade. He was once a confidant of Mulayam Singh Yadav who had visited his house in Agra. A law graduate with a doctorate in military science, Baghel had been a faculty member at the Agra College in Agra.
As a minister in UP, he had moved into the 6-Kalidas Marg bungalow that shares its boundary with the chief minister’s 5- Kalidas Marg residence despite many of his colleagues in the Yogi ministry having refused it on the ground that it was “bad omen”.
“I don’t believe in superstition,” SP Singh Baghel had said then. Subsequently, he contested the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Agra and won. He is currently the union minister of state in the ministry of law and justice.
