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Lok Sabha elections 2019: After Mayawati’s PM hint, focus on BSP citadel in east UP
BJP’s Hari Om Pandey won Ambedkar Nagar in 2014 with 41.77% vote share. The then sitting MP Rakesh Pandey, a BSP veteran, lost with 28% vote share.
For the locals of Akbarpur, it was a recap of 1995 when Mayawati, chief of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had made the announcement of new district, Ambedkar Nagar, carving it out from Faizabad. Development was swift — medical and engineering colleges, the city’s first flyover, a district court hospital made the Lok Sabha constituency a fortress for the BSP. Before delimitation, the seat was known as Akbarpur, and Mayawati was elected thrice from here. Now known as the Ambedkar Nagar, the BSP lost the seat to the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014.
However, with almost 24% Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe population, the seat is one of the safest ones for BSP. This is why Mayawati, in a rally on May 5, announced that Ambedkar Nagar would be the seat that she would choose to contest from, should the need arise — her clearest indication yet of her prime ministerial ambition, this election season. In the May 5 rally, Mayawati had said, “If all goes well, I may have to seek election form here because the road to national politics passes through Ambedkar Nagar.”
BJP’s Hari Om Pandey won Ambedkar Nagar in 2014 with 41.77% vote share. The then sitting MP Rakesh Pandey, a BSP veteran, lost with 28% vote share. This time around, with Samajwadi Party — the BSP’s alliance partner — not putting up its candidate, and the nomination of the Congress’s candidate being rejected on technical grounds, it is advantage BSP.
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Rejected Congress candidate Umed Singh agrees. “Though I am disappointed that my candidature was rejected on technical grounds, now the Muslim wanting to vote for Congress will vote for BSP while some of the Schedule Caste vote will shift towards BJP,” said Singh, who is the
husband of the late MP Phoolan Devi.
Though 11 candidates are in the fray in Ambedkar Nagar, the main contest seems to be between BJP’s Mukut Bihari Verma, a 71-year-old native of Bahraich, and BSP’s Ritesh Pandey, son of former MP Rakesh Pandey.
Shyam Kumar Shukla, a school teacher at Ambedkar Nagar Intermediate College, said: “Ambedkar Nagar is adjacent to Ayodhya, yet during the Ram temple movement [in the 1990s], the BJP failed to win the seat [Akbarpur]. Riding on the Modi wave, the BJP won in 2014. The BJP is again relying on Modi to retain the seat.”
“We were here in 1995 and after 24 years, it seems that crowd has only got bigger. The Schedule Caste population is one factor, but the development done by her is equally responsible for her popularity here,” said Qamar Hasnain, a local journalist.
