Lok Sabha Election 2024: Samajwadi Party Announces First List Of 16 Candidates (image-twitter/akhileshyadav)
Samajwadi Party (SP) on Tuesday announced the list of 16 candidates, thereby becoming the first major party to announce candidates for the upcoming parliament elections.
Among the candidate list, Dimple Yadav, the wife of former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav will contest from Mainpuri. The party has also picked two other members of founder Mulayam Singh Yadav’s clan other than Dimple Yadav, nephew Dharmendra Yadav from Badaun, and his cousin and SP secretary general Ram Gopal Yadav’s son Akshay Yadav from Friozabad.
Dimple Yadav secured a victory by a significant margin of 2,88,461 in the byelection in December last year from Mainpuri defeating Raghuraj Singh Shakya of BJP.
Mainpuri constituency is one of the strongholds of the Samajwadi party. The seat became vacant after the demise of Mulayam Singh Yadav on October 10.
Akshay Yadav will be fielded as the candidate from Firozabad, while Shivashakar Singh Patel will be representing the SP from Banda, reports Times of India.
But SP has retained the seat of MP Shafiq-ur-Rehman Barq in Sambhal. He is at the age of 93 and is one of the oldest parliamentarians and has been elected five times to the Lok Sabha from Sambhal.
In the Lok Sabha, the Samajwadi party which allied with Bahujan Samaj (BSP) in 2019, has 3 seats, meanwhile, BSP has 10 seats.
— Samajwadi Party (@samajwadiparty) January 30, 2024
The 16 candidates on the list are- Dharmendra Yadav from Badaun, Utkarsh Varma from Kheri, Akshay Yadav from Firozabad, Anand Bhadoria from Dhaurahra, Annu Tandon from Unnao, Awadhesh Prasad from Faizabad, Kajal Nishad from Gorakhpur, Ram Prasad Chaudhary from Basti, Shivashankar Singh Patel from Banda, Lalji Verma from Ambedkar Nagar, Ravidas Mehrotra from Lucknow, Dr Naval Kishore Shakya from Farrukhabad and Raja Ram Pal from Akbarpur.
Akhilesh Yadav has earlier announced that the Congress will contest 11 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, while the Samajwadi Party and Jayant Choudhary-led Rashtriya Lok Dal will contest 69 seats together.
As per the sources, Congress is not happy over the SP announcement of the list of 16 candidates, reports Indian Express. Many Congress leaders have alleged that this was the SP’s “pressure tactics” to get their party to agree to its seat-sharing offer and the announcement without informing the Congress leadership had blindsided it.
