Samajwadi Party's Kannauj loss shows party must rethink strategy
India Today
In the recently-concluded Assembly elections, the BJP scripted history while the Samajwadi Party finished second, winning 111 of the 403 Assembly seats in the state.
Ram Manohar Lohia, the Samajwadi Party’s political mentor, won his first election in the year 1967 from the Kannauj parliamentary constituency. The area has five assembly constituencies, two of which, with a sizeable Dalit population, are reserved for candidates from the Scheduled Caste.
Several decades since Lohia’s win, the Samajwadi Party made Kannauj their bastion “claiming” the socialist legacy of Lohia.
In the 1998 parliamentary elections, Pradeep Yadav from the party won. Then party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav won the “safe” seat in 1999. The current party president, Akhilesh Yadav, remained an MP from this seat from 2000 to 2009, winning three consecutive elections. Akhilesh Yadav gave this “safe” seat to his wife Dimple and she remained an MP from this seat for two terms till 2019, when Subrat Pathak of the BJP defeated her.
However, the assembly segments of the area remained in the SP fold until 2022. Anil Kumar Dohare was the MLA from the seat reserved for SC in Kannauj for 15 years and was defeated by IPS officer-turned-politician Asim Arun, who contested on a BJP ticket for the first time. Arun won by a margin of 6,084 votes. BJP’s incumbent MLA Archana Pandey defeated BSP candidate Tahir Hussain Siddiquie by a margin of 37,224 votes.
In the Tirwa assembly constituency, BJP’s Kailash Rajput defeated SP’s Anil Pal by 4,943 votes. While in the Bidhuna assembly constituency, BJP’s Riya Shakya defeated SP’s Rekha Verma by 7,765 votes. In the seat reserved for the SCs in Rasulabad, BJP’s Poonam Sankhwar polled 21,512 more votes than SP’s Kamlesh Diwakar.
Also Read: | How Samajwadi Party gained and lost Kshatriya votes
This year, the BJP swept Kannauj, considered the Yadav family’s safe seat. Local leaders claim that ignorance of the party, anti-incumbency against the sitting MLA, and free food grain for the underprivileged played a pivotal role in SP’s complete defeat in the area.
