A shadow contest of immense symbolic importance shall play out in Ghosi on September 5 when a combined opposition will take on the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. It is a first of its kind face-off between INDIA and the BJP, which could well be a preview of the not so far off Lok Sabha elections.
The by-election was necessitated by the resignation of sitting MLA Dara Singh Chauhan, who switched sides from the Samajwadi Party (SP) to the BJP. Chauhan has a checkered political history—he started off with the Congress, then moved to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and then to the BJP.
In the first term of the Yogi Adityanath-led state government, he was minister for forests and environment. An apparently poor one at that, as there was talk of him being denied a ticket for the 2021 state election. So, he sought refuge in the SP after accusing the BJP of ignoring the dalits, backwards and the youth. Party chief Akhilesh Yadav welcomed him with a tweet that labelled Chauhan a ‘relentless fighter’ for ‘social justice’. By July 2023, the charm of the welcome faded and Chauhan resigned as an MLA and got back to the BJP predicting that the party would win all 80 seats from the state in the 2024 general elections.
Chauhan’s political ideology thus could be called into question and might well lead to his defeat. Yet the BJP is banking on his caste to be the trump card. He is a Noniya—a caste of influence in some eight seats in eastern UP. The traditional occupation of the caste is salt making, and it is among the socially and economically most deprived. They are one of the Other Backward Castes (OBC) in the state’s list of 76 such castes. A constant demand has been that they be tagged as Scheduled Castes (SC).
Chauhan perhaps has some inkling of the public’s disenchantment with him. Recently, as he got out of his vehicle in Ghosi, a miscreant threw ink on him. The jury is still out on whether this was a ploy construed by the BJP itself to earn sympathy for him.
The Samajwadi Party candidate is Sudhakar Singh. He has the support of the Congress and the Communist Party of India. The Rashtriya Lok Dal and the Apna Dal (K) have also asked their workers to campaign for him.
Singh is a SP veteran and won his first election in 1996 as the party’s candidate and then again in 2012. In 2017 though he lost to the BJP candidate. Though he strongly protested against being denied a ticket in 2022, he chose to remain with the party. This ticket is seen as an reward for his loyalty.
Singh’s candidature is important for the SP to demonstrate that even after Chauhan and Om Prakash Rajbhar’s leaving, it has a tight grip over the OBC vote.
The state’s other significant player—BSP—has stayed away from the contest thus leaving the seat open for a direct fight between a united opposition and the BJP. The SP has said that the BSP’s choice will benefit the BJP, as the dalit votes might well be the key for winning the seat. There are some 60,000 dalit votes in the constituency and the Muslim votes are 30,000 more than that number. Singh is a Thakur and his victory will also mean that the combined opposition can dent the BJP’s upper caste vote.
The significance of the contest can be gauged from the fact that Yadav and uncle Shivpal are both on the campaign trail. The BJP’s list of star campaigners includes defence minister Rajnath Singh, both the state’s deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak, in addition to union ministers Mahendra Nath Pandey, Kaushal Kishor and Pankaj Chowdhary.
10 contestants in the fray
An analysis of candidate affidavits by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has revealed that six of the contesting candidates have criminal cases against them, ranging from a single charge to eight. The educational qualifications of the candidates range from literate to post-graduate. Seven have listed agriculture as their occupation, while the remaining three are: business, tailor and self-employed.
With eight cases against him, Sudhakar Singh of the SP tops the list. He is also the most educated. Chauhan comes in second with six cases. His educational qualification is class 12. Singh’s charges include—voluntarily causing of hurt to deter public servant from doing his duty, criminal intimidation and attempt to murder. Chauhan’s sheet includes dacoity, robbery, criminal intimidation, rioting and voluntarily causing hurt to a public servant to deter him from performing his duty.