Lucknow: Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav will contest the Lok Sabha polls from Azamgarh, the eastern UP seat currently held by his father and party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav.
With Akhilesh’s entry into the fray, five members of the Yadav family will now be fighting the polls — Mulayam Singh from Mainpuri, Akhilesh’s wife Dimple from Kannauj, Dharmendra Yadav from Badaun and Akshay Yadav from Firozabad.
The party also announced that senior leader Azam Khan will contest from Rampur, having represented the eponymous assembly constituency nine times.
The SP’s announcement came four days after Mayawati, chief of its ally BSP, declared that she would not contest elections this time.
Why Akhilesh chose Azamgarh
Earlier this month, Akhilesh had met party leaders from Azamgarh, who urged him to either contest the seat himself or choose another popular Yadav leader. Shortly after, Akhilesh had said in a TV interview that Azamgarh was home to samajwadis and he would contest the polls from there if the people wanted it.
In 2014, amid the Modi wave that swept through UP, Mulayam Singh had won the Azamgarh seat by over 1,30,000 votes against BJP’s Ramakant Yadav, who had defected from the SP.
In the 2017 assembly polls too, Azamgarh resisted the BJP wave sweeping the rest of the state, with the SP winning three of the five assembly segments that make up the Lok Sabha constituency while the BSP won two. The SP’s traditional voter base of Yadavs and Muslims dominate the demography of Azamgarh.
Also read: Akhilesh Yadav is a loser even before the 2019 elections have begun
Azam Khan takes a step up
This will be the first time that Azam Khan, one of the co-founders of the SP, contests a Lok Sabha election from his home town. He was a Rajya Sabha MP between 1996 and 2002.
Known for his controversial statements, Khan was recently in the news when the walls and ‘Urdu Gate’ of the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University founded by him were demolished by the local administration, which claimed that the structure was unauthorised. This had invited the wrath of Khan as well as Akhilesh Yadav.
Interestingly, in 2009, Khan was expelled from the SP for six years when he rebelled against the party’s decision to field actor Jaya Prada from Rampur. A year later, the two sides made up and Khan rejoined the party.
Also read: Congress merely wants to save itself, not defeat Modi: Akhilesh Yadav