Maneka can hope to retain Sultanpur in absence of SP-BSP alliance

Tribune News Service

Sandeep Dikshit

Sultanpur/Jaunpur, May 22

United by the Gomti and the electoral influence of gangster-politicians who hold sway over the twin constituencies of Jaunpur and Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh, as the polling day of May 25 nears, voters are keeping their cards close to their chests.

Sultanpur has always found itself on the edge of the Gandhi family’s influence over Amethi and Raebareli. In fact, the Amethi district was carved out of three tehsils of Sultanpur district — Amethi, Gauriganj and Musafirkhana — and one tehsil, Tiloi, from the Raebareli district.

It was in keeping with Sultanpur’s sense of being associated with the Gandhi clan that PM Narendra Modi played his trump card in 2014 after the Congress wrested this seat in 2009, following eight straight losses. Varun Gandhi had scored an effortless victory by 1.8 lakh votes in 2014 due to a division in votes between the SP and the BSP.

BJP supporters here hope for a repeat of 2014, after Maneka Gandhi’s narrow squeak by a mere 15,000 votes in 2019 because of a united front presented by the SP and BSP.

“The caste equations here would have made it difficult for Mataji (Maneka) had the BSP-SP put up a joint candidate again. Now she stands a good chance,” says BJP backer Gopi Nath Pandey from Pandeypur. He points out that Dalits, Muslims and Yadavs — the three core sections that would have supported a united SP-BSP candidate — comprise 55 per cent of the voter base. The two regional parties had fought the 2022 Assembly poll separately and the BJP had won four of five seats here.

However, it is not just caste arithmetic that determines the winner in a land where the shadow of gangster-politicians, politely referred to as Bahubalis, hangs heavy. One such, Sonu Singh, a former BSP MLA, was the one who gave Maneka a scare in 2019 as the joint BSP-SP candidate. He has since joined the SP, as has former BSP Cabinet Minister and OBC leader Ram Bhual Nishad, who is the SP candidate from here.

“Nishad ji is from Gorakhpur, which is 200 km away from here,” points out Manoj Pal, who says he is weighing whether it is worth voting for the BSP candidate Uday Raj Verma, who would stand a chance if he could pull in a majority of the four lakh Dalit and one lakh fellow Kurmi votes.

Jaunpur, the “Mirzapur” of the Netflix series, has a surfeit of politician-gangsters; and the drama centred around one such, Dhananjay Singh, still reverberates among the electorate. The Thakurs of the district were up in arms against the BJP after he was convicted and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment.

Mysteriously, Singh was bailed out a week later and equally intriguingly, the BSP withdrew the ticket given to his third wife Sreekala Reddy, who had already been campaigning for a week. While people urged her to contest as an Independent, Reddy withdrew from the race and met Home Minister Amit Shah on May 16.

Now, Mayawati has nominated Shyam Singh Yadav, one of the 10 BSP MPs who had won in 2019, whom she had overlooked initially in favour of Dhananjay’s wife. Singh is now rooting for the BJP candidate, an import from Mumbai and with an insalubrious past, Kripa Shankar Singh. A former chief of Mumbai Congress and twice state Cabinet Minister in Maharashtra, Singh had struck it big among the eastern UP community in the metropolis by standing up to the Shiv Sena.

“Kripashankar ji is fortunate. The BSP’s Yadav candidate should disrupt the SP vote-bank and Dhananjay Singh’s support will bring in additional votes,” feels Ram Khilawan Singh, a BJP supporter from Badlapur.

Caste equations do dominate here and it may not, therefore, not be easy for the will of Bahubalis to prevail.

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