Within 48 hours of the arrival of BJP president Rajnath Singh, who is also the party’s Lok Sabha candidate here, the ruling SP on Thursday changed its nominee from the constituency, replacing the ageing Ashok Bajpai with the young Abhishek Mishra.
While Rajnath is being projected as the inheritor of the legacy of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had won the seat six times since 1991 before vacating it in 2009, Bajpai was almost written off as an outsider from Hardoi, where even the party men ignored him. Abhishek, formerly a professor at IIM Ahmedabad and currently Science and Technology Minister in the Akhilesh Yadav government, represents the SP’s transition from the traditional to the modern and from the rural to the urban. Rajnath is confident of his victory, he is apprehensive about the Brahmins’ support .