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Lok Sabha elections 2019: BSP fields candidates in all seven seats, says AAP will be a ‘tough nut to crack’
Three of the party’s candidates— Shahid Ali from Chandni Chowk, Sidhanth Gautam from South Delhi and Satish Sansi from North West Delhi (reserved seat) — are lawyers.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has fielded candidates from all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi. While three of them had filed their nominations last week, three more filed their papers Monday and the last candidate Tuesday.
Three of the party’s candidates— Shahid Ali from Chandni Chowk, Sidhanth Gautam from South Delhi and Satish Sansi from North West Delhi (reserved seat) — are lawyers.
Two of them— Rajveer Singh from North East Delhi and Sushil Vadera from New Delhi— are businessmen. Singh has been a BSP supporter since the mid-90s and is considered to be close to party chief Mayawati, senior party functionaries said.
Sanjay Gehlot from East Delhi is a sanitation worker who also heads a union group of safai karmacharis. Sita Saran from West Delhi is a retired armed forces personnel. All seven are contesting elections for the first time, BSP functionaries in Delhi said.
The BSP has been contesting assembly elections in Delhi since 1993 but it was only in 2003 that the party had fielded candidates from all 70 assembly seats. Since then, the party has fielded candidates from all seats every assembly election, although the only time it had managed to win seats (two) was in 2008. It was also the year when the party secured a vote share of around 14%, its highest till date.
Since 2004, the party has been contesting general elections in Delhi and it has been fielding candidates from all seven seats. The BSP, however, has never managed to win a Lok Sabha seat in the national capital. In 2009, the party secured a vote share of around 5.2%, its highest tally in Delhi so far. “The party’s major vote bank has always been the people of the Jatav caste, followed by other scheduled castes such as Valmikis and Muslims,” BSP’s Delhi convener CP Singh said.
Keeping this in mind, of the seven candidates the BSP fielded this time, one is from the minority (Shahid Ali), four from the SC (Sidhanth Gautam (Jatav), Satish Sansi (denotified tribe), Sushil Vadera and Sanjay Gehlot (Valmiki)) one from the OBC (Sita Saran ). Only Rajveer Singh , a Kshatriya Thakur, is an upper caste candidate.
This is the first time in Delhi that a person from the denotified tribe, Sansi, has been given a ticket, Singh claimed.
He said the vote share of the party went down after the battle in Delhi became a three-way fight with the emergence of the AAP.
The AAP contested its first assembly elections in Delhi in 2013 and the first Lok Sabha elections in Delhi in 2014.
“The AAP emerged as the party of the poor and the largest chunk of the BSP vote bank also comprise the poor. Thus, a major shift (towards AAP) happened,” Singh said. “Our fight against the BJP will be on issues like communal disharmony, caste politics, jobs, demonetisation and our fight against the Congress will be on corruption. But the AAP will be a tough nut to crack.”
When it comes to fighting the AAP, senior BSP functionaries said they will be using the caste card in their campaigns. The idea, they said, is to convince people that the AAP did not send to the Rajya Sabha someone from the backward caste and their poll plank on full statehood has got nothing for the poor people of the scheduled castes, OBCs and minority groups.
“The vote share of BSP will go up this year,” Gehlot, the party’s candidate from East Delhi, said.
“Most people from the scheduled castes and backward communities are engaged in sanitation work. The Congress is the cause of their woes as that party had trifurcated the municipal corporation. The BJP has control over all three corporations currently but sanitation workers do not have permanent jobs. They had voted for the AAP en masse but the AAP has also failed them. They had promised permanent jobs but that never materialised,” he said.
