Fifth phase of LS polls: Important contests in Uttar Pradesh

In the fifth phase of the elections in Uttar Pradesh, 14 seats—including the VIP seats of Rae Bareli and Amethi—are voting.

Party presidents, ministers and turncoats are trying their luck in this phase of keenly watched contests, which include Lucknow, Rae Bareli, Amethi, Faizabad (where Ayodhya is located) and Dhaurahra.

Lucknow has been a BJP seat since 1991 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee contested and won it. In 2009, Lalji Tandon won the seat and in 2014, Home Minister Rajnath Singh won from here. The contest here is between Rajnath Singh and Poonam Shatrughan Sinha who is fighting on a SP ticket.

Raj Babbar, Javed Jaffrey, Karn Singh, Ram Jethmalani and Muzaffar Ali have fought from Lucknow, but failed to enamour the voter. The city has a sizeable Shia population, which is openly supporting the BJP. Rajnath also met Mulayam Singh Yadav, causing considerable consternation in the SP camp. Rajnath's vote count in the 2014 election was 5,61,106 and the candidate who came second was Rita Bahuguna Joshi of the Congress with 2,88,357 votes.

The Rae Bareli seat has been won by the Nehru Gandhi family every time except in the 1977 Lok Sabha election. In 2014, the much-touted Modi wave was a whimper in this constituency, which gave Sonia Gandhi a winning margin of 3.5 lakh votes. Sonia has won the seat four times. There has been some discomfort in the Congress camp since a party MLC, Dinesh Pratap Singh, filed his papers from Rae Bareli. Dinesh Pratap had been crucial to ensuring Gandhi’s win in 2014 and has phenomenal knowledge of the booths. The focus of the Congress strategy is thus to ensure maximum voter turnout to boost prospects of a good margin of victory.

Amethi, the three-time seat of Rahul Gandhi, is witnessing an interesting battle with Smriti Irani. The last election, in which Irani took on Rahul, Rahul's victory margin dropped significantly to just over 1 lakh votes. In contrast, between the two elections, the BJP had improved its vote tally by 2.63 lakh. This time, Irani is back at snapping at Rahul, while Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has made repeated visits to the constituency, emphasising the emotional connect that the district’s people share with the Nehru-Gandhis.

Ayodhya shows no sign of the Ram Mandir wave it has been identified with over successive elections. Bharat Mata ki Jai is heard more than Jai Sri Ram in Ayodhya. The sitting Faizabad MP, Lallu Singh of the BJP, is in a three-cornered fight with Nirmal Khatri of the Congress and SP’s Anand Sen. The Faizabad seat had been with the BJP since 1991 when Vinay Katiyar, a firebrand leader of the Mandir movement, won it. In 2004, the Faizabad seat went to the BSP and in 2009 to the Congress, before the BJP won it back in 2014.

The contests in the fifth phase will also be important for the Yogi Adityanath government to evaluate the hold of the MLAs on their respective areas. In Gonda, for instance, all five MLAs belong to the ruling party and a comfortable win for sitting MP, Kirtivardhan Singh, will indicate how well the MLAs are doing their work and how successfully they have taken the policies of the government to the people.

In Dhaurahra, former minister Jitin Prasada is fighting a three-cornered battle with the BSP-SP alliance’s Arshad Ahmed Siddiqui and BJP’s Rekha Verma who was the runner-up in the last election.

In Banda, the BJP is in a pickle as its MP from Allahabad, Shyama Charan Gupta, is fighting on a BSP-SP ticket. In Fatehpur, Union minister Sadhvi Niranjan is in the fray.