LUCKNOW: A day after the departure of the Nishad party from the SP-BSP-RLD alliance, the Samajwadi Party (SP) on Saturday named its own candidate from the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat.
After dropping sitting MP Praveen Nishad, the party announced the name of Ram Bhuwal Nishad from the seat. Both Praveen and Ram Bhuwal belong to the same community. The SP also announced its candidate for Kanpur, Ram Kumar, who is also from the Nishad community and is the brother of former Unnao MP Deepak Kumar. It also changed its Moradabad candidate, Nasir Qureshi, replacing him with S T Hasan.
The Nishad Party, which ended Adityanath’s unchallenged reign of two decades in Gorakhpur after the 2018 bypoll, created a flutter by snapping off ties with the alliance and meeting Adityanath on Friday evening. The party claimed that it was free to take a decision and was exploring options.
Praveen had breached Adityanath’s fort by contesting the 2018 bypoll on an SP ticket from Gorakhpur defeating the BJP’s Upendra Shukla with a margin of around 60, 000 votes.
According to functionaries who were familiar with negotiations between the Nishad Party and the alliance, party chief Sanjay Nishad was upset with a delay by the SP leadership in announcing candidates for Gorakhpur and Mahrajganj. He was also reportedly not comfortable in contesting on the SP’s symbol.
The Nishad community makes a formidable 15 per cent (3.5 lakh) chunk of the electoral population in Gorakhpur. Moreover, the community has an acknowledgeable presence in the adjoining districts.